In some small companies, the notion that employees are family is a joke. Though the company literature and the CEO’s speeches may try to propagate this myth, everyone knows that the organization will not spend one extra penny on its employees or implement programs or policies that they have requested. The organization is perceived as cold and money-hungry, and people often are eager to leave these companies at the fi rst available opportunity.
To counter this perception and make employees feel that you really do regard them as part of a corporate family, consider the following measures that other small businesses have imple- mented successfully.
Set up a college fund for employees’ sons and daughters. This is enormously easy to do, costs very little, and is something most of your employees with children will appreciate and participate
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in. For instance, one small business owner I interviewed wanted to offer some kind of incentive to keep his sales manager happy and with the company for at least the next fi ve years. The owner agreed to set up a college fund for each of the manager’s young daughters, ages one and four, with the proviso that the manager had to stay with the company for at least fi ve years to use this fund.
The owner started what is called a College 529 Plan, which allows money to be deferred pre-state tax for each child. When the child starts college, the money is pulled from the fund, without any taxes on earnings, and used to pay for all college expenses. This owner set up a plan in his own name with the manager’s two daughters as the benefi ciaries. The owner would then deposit $2,000 into each account annually. If the sales manager stayed with the company for fi ve years, the owner would transfer ownership of the plan over to him. If the manager left the company any earlier, he would receive nothing, and the owner would either change the benefi ciaries of the fund or cash it out.
Buy life insurance for employees. Again, this is a relatively inexpensive investment that communicates you care about your employees and their families. You may not realize how inexpen- sive some types of life insurance are. For example, you can pur- chase a $500,000 term life insurance policy for less than $1,000 in many instances. You can also give employees the option of retaining this insurance policy even if they leave your company;
they simply pay for the policy themselves. Most won’t exercise this option if they leave (so it doesn’t provide an incentive to leave), but while they are with the company, they appreciate the gesture, as do their families.
Offer sabbaticals. Borrow a page from academia and offer people leaves of absence for specifi c reasons: personal prob- lems (death, divorce), educational programs (special university courses), travel, and so on. Clearly, you can’t offer sabbaticals to
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everyone at any time; small companies are delicate mechanisms, and you can’t take out a cog here and a wheel there and expect to continue to operate smoothly. This should be a perk for longtime employees who have performed well. Some of them may simply need a break after many years of loyal service, while others have problems to solve or opportunities to capitalize on. In any case, the opportunity to take a sabbatical is much appreciated by employees in a variety of circumstances.
Provide work-at-home options. Again, this isn’t possible for all employees, especially if they’re required to be on the factory fl oor or if their physical presence is absolutely essential on a daily basis. At the same time, some people will be able to be just as pro- ductive working at home part- or full-time as if they were to come into the offi ce. With tools such as e-mail and videoconferencing, this is a viable option in the right circumstances. It can be an especially valuable arrangement for parents who have very young children and want to be able to spend more time at home. We’ve also found that customers have no problem dealing with at-home employees—they just want to get a question answered or problem solved. For instance, when our receptionist takes the call from a customer or supplier for a work-at-home employee, she forwards the call to this individual’s desk phone, which can forward that call automatically to an offi ce at home or a cell phone on the road. Employees working at home are logged into our server at work just as if they were sitting at their desk in the offi ce, enabling them to give the customer or supplier the information needed.
The customer often doesn’t even know that these individuals are not at the offi ce. In fact, I know a partner with a law fi rm who decided that she had had enough of the big-city life and was mov- ing to Montana. Her fi rm worked out a deal where she would work from her house in Montana, and none of their clients even knew she had moved until they asked to meet with her. It took a very short time for her to prove that she could provide the same quality
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of work from over 1,000 miles away as she could if she were sitting at a desk in the big-city offi ce.
Offer fl ex time. For a variety of reasons—many involving fam- ily issues, some people prefer a more fl exible schedule than a nine- to-fi ve, fi ve-day-a-week routine. Once again, you can’t offer this benefi t to everyone. Some employees, however, don’t need to be there when everyone else is there. You may have a great fi nancial person who has just had a baby and is trying to be at home when his wife is at work. She has fl extime, and if he had it, they could juggle parenting responsibilities without having to put their child in daycare. This fi nancial person could come in on weekends and work afternoons and early evenings (or whatever schedule makes sense). Many big companies have concerns about fl extime and work-at-home situations, certain that people will be less produc- tive if they’re not being monitored constantly. As a small business owner, though, you probably know your staff better than a man- ager at a big company does, and you can make a good guess about who will be responsible working under a fl extime system.