ROI on Employees

Over my 25 years in HR management, I have worked for several employers, so I do have the experience in working with different types of cultures. Some work environments were run on fear, and others more on indifference, when it came to employee relations. Actually, my experience in the public sector with local government was probably the best ER culture, maybe due that the workforce was primarily union and they had nothing to fear from management.

In all these employers, the one thing that stood out was the notion that employees were not the same in terms of investment as opposed to capital parts of the budget, such as equipment, and other parts of the "overhead" business. Yet, employees are an investment, not just in salaries and benefits, but more importantly, in TIME. Employers I experienced had the money to pay for employees, but when it came to the investment of time, well, that seemed to be too much of a precious gem to give up on.
Recently, articles have been written about whether performance appraisals are a necessary function of a business. In my experience, if performance appraisals are used solely as a tool to gather negative information over the past 12 months, or as a discipline tool, well no wonder both management and employees dread the annual review. We lost the meaning of communications to employees, including myself, during my career. Appraisals should be done everyday, not in a literal sense of writing up an action plan for each employee, but discussing with employees about what they are doing and how are they going about doing their job effectively.

I once worked with an owner of a business that stopped by my office everyday and asked me "How's progress?" I usually responded by saying things were OK and that was pretty much it. Finally, one day I asked him if he wanted me to implement a formal PA program for our 150 employees, including myself. He replied that he had been asking for job review everyday by walking by my office and asking 'how's progress'. I replied I did not want to bore him with the mundane aspects of my job and concern him with minor problems. He stated that he hired me to not only see the problem, but to bring the solutions of the problem to him. This was one of my first positions in HR management and in made sense. He knew his business would have problems, and hired me to identify the issues and create the solutions to solve them. He provided the trust in me to get the job done.

Unfortunately, as I gained more experience after that position, my employers would not accept new approaches to issues, becoming either micro managers of all departments, or worse, not really caring about most operations unless serious problems arose. The employees they hired, not just management, but the employees in key positions, were not allowed to integrate their concerns and advice to the overall business operations. In other words, the employer ignored their investment in their people, causing poor or untimely decisions that created a bad work environment, which will inevitably transfer back to the customer. I am not a business writer or professional consultant, but from hands on experience in the business culture. If senior management fails to recognize the employees as a true, most vital investment within their operations, they will eventually lose their business customers, and worse, the trust of the workers.