Losing one employee can feel like the end of the world.
I recently had a long-time employee leave. The business improved. How?
In a small business, every employee feels like a critical employee. It’s because they are.
In fact, even before that employee ever leaves, there can be fear as to how the business will ever survive if that person is gone.
Or worse, what if two employees leave in quick succession?
It can feel devastating.
I don’t like to learn hard lessons more than once.
It has taken me years to build redundancy in my team. We want to minimize the risk of losing any one employee—including me, the boss.
You never know how good (or bad) a system is until you’re forced to put it into action.
A long-time employee resigned. But, the company improved. Here’s why:
- Have More than One Person for Every Job: Everyone has a backup. One is none, two is one. It’s not just that someone could leave – they could get sick, go on vacation, have an accident, or something else. We always need to have someone ready to pick up any slack.
- Training, Training, Training: When a new person comes, you want to get them up to speed as soon as possible. Great training resources for employees make that possible.
- Develop Repeatable Processes: Think about how difficult fast-food businesses are to run. Employee turnover can be 100% or more in a year. But, in order to make that work consistently for decades, they have clear processes. Work on improving your processes.
Losing an employee no longer feels like the end of the world. It becomes a stress-test, a chance for us to evaluate the robustness of our systems and identify areas for improvement.
Two is one, and one is none. Where do you have none?
#training #resilience #improvement #backup #employee #systems #turnover #preparedness #processes #redundancy