Ten Reasons to Tune Up Your People Engine

I used to be a mileage fanatic. Every time I filled up my car with gas I would calculate my fuel mileage and check it against the mileage I had gotten on recent tank-fulls. One reason I did that was to keep an eye on my car's general performance. A significant dip in mileage meant it was probably time to do a tune-up. These days tune-ups every few thousand miles are a part of history.

I was reminded of this recently when I told someone what I do and got this question back: "How do your clients know they need your services?" Since I didn't have a very good answer on the tip of my tongue, I decided to do some thinking about it. In business, we don't do employee performance tune-ups every year or every 3 years just because the owner's manual says to do so. Who got an owner's manual? Did you get one? Of course not.

Instead, we need to be on the lookout for some common signs that the people engine isn't running as well as it should.

Here are ten very common symptoms of a people engine that needs some attention.

1. Employee turnover is unacceptably high. You know that some turnover is inevitable, but there is also a point where it's simply too high.

2. Losses due to employee errors are too high or climbing. Sure, we all make mistakes once in a while. But if this year's mistakes are costing 40% more than last year's, what's going on?

3. You see evidence of low morale among your employees. No one is always happy or perfectly motivated all the time. But you know your employees well enough to see when they are much less happy than they should be.

4. Slow learning among new hires means it takes far too long to "get up to speed" in their new jobs. Effective on-the-job training is an essential system in your people engine. Your new hires' learning curve is a good gauge of this crucial system.

5. Employees complain of problems in communication or teamwork. This one is a bit subtle, because sometimes these complaints mask something else, like a sense of unfairness in the compensation or work-distribution practices.

6. You find yourself tinkering with the compensation plan (again!) in hopes of spurring increased performance. Money is not what drives an individual's performance - at least it's not the most important driver.

7. You hesitate to grow the business because you don't think your employees are a strong enough team on which to build. Since you have to grow a little just to stay even, this concern is particularly dangerous. It's telling you in your gut that something needs work now.

8. Employee productivity is down or flat and low. However you measure productivity - and it's probably different for different positions in the business - it's a good gauge of overall performance.

9. Low motivation has you trying new contests or other incentive programs regularly in order to boost employee performance. This is often the case in sales environments but if you find you need these gimmicks all the time, something may be wrong with the way the engine is running.

10. Your managers aren't managing. This is a failure of your management development system. It's not catastrophic, but it will cause you to get much worse "mileage" (i.e., profits) than you should be getting.

Finally, since I want to make sure you get your money's worth, I have one more.

11. Customer complaints are rising or changing character for the worse. Of course, you will always get an occasional complaint. But if you track them and find the number or nature of complaints is on the rise, it's time to find out why and repair the cause.

Now, just as the need to buy pants with a larger waist is a good sign that it's time to start working out again, each of these signs is a good indicator that your people engine needs some attention. If you see any of these signs in your business, the only question is when to get started finding a solution.

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