Pairing youth and business.
I am sure I have said this before, and I’ll say it again. During the 35 years that we ran our family business, often, we trained our employees from zero. This often included sewing operators, upholsterers as well as general labor. One benefit we had with this was that we could train eager individuals. What we had found was that women more often than not were more eager to work and much more reliable. Training both men and women was easier when they had no bad habits from other employers.
We hired everyone.
Another thing was… we hired nearly everyone that showed eagerness and willingness to work. This came to us from years of playing soccer and coaching soccer.
A person who has the heart and willingness to learn is more valuable than a lazy experienced one.
Very often the so-called experienced people have been around the block often. They may have moved from one job or another for better pay and their loyalty is questionable.
The question of how to retain trained employees always comes up. Well, this is easy enough to understand and counter because…
We trained people for specific tasks. Most jobs were part and parcel of one another. A specific type of upholstery will it be suitable for a complete sofa. The skill we taught was not something individuals could take with them. This assembly line method of broken-down jobs was not necessarily transferable.
That and being nice.
Being nice to people often overcomes the amount of money one can make. This leads me to another example.
Treat people like you would like to be treated.
We never yelled at anyone, we treated everyone with respect and they stayed. Due to our business model, we had lower wages than others. We didn’t have benefits for everyone, but they stayed. They stayed and stayed loyal to us because we were nice to them. In our industry, there were many manufacturers that treated employees like crap. We didn’t and the staff stayed.
This needs to improve.
Looking ahead to business locally here in Indonesia I can see that the loyalty is there. Hospitality, caring, and friendliness are part of the Indonesian culture. Digging deeper and creating better employees from younger people is the key to a better workforce. Feed the young minds with better information, and create value and loyalty in the people. Join the millions of small businesses and encourage this new attitude and it will benefit the young, old, and the businesses themselves.
Zsolt Zsemba 