Many of you will have seen forums where the nasty boss is mentioned and various people have jumped in with numerous stories of how they have had to put up with a lousy boss. The stories are amusing enough, the problem is they are all too common.

In this day and age the idea that a miserly boss exists seems a huge anomaly to me and thankfully I have not had too many over my career.

Examples will cover low wages, poor conditions, poor recognition of work done, seemingly not knowing that a Christmas party boosts morale and not only celebrates Christmas.

The challenge is that this issue can quickly become a hassle and if the business does not come to terms with it, in a buoyant market place the staff turnover will be one form of evidence things are not running effectively. Follow it up with the chance that pilfering and fraud can happen too, and the outcomes can be very costly!

Ok Mr (or Mrs) Miser, it’s time to wise up. There is an old saying that you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar. Therefore to be in a position where staff turnover and the other hassles are minimised you need to take positive action now.

• I appreciate that you may have been bought up to have frugal ways and you are tight with money. Hand the function of staff happiness to another person and set a generous budget.
• Assign others with the task of finding out what is making your staff happy, or not (try a paper survey), then look at what research has been done on this issue (lots!) and take action to rectify it now!
• Appreciate there are times when these things can snowball out of control, your aim is to stop it snowballing, when yo do a direct measure of it will be people smiling followed by lower absenteeism, these are probably the key indicators you have done things right, so don’t stop, keep going.
• Your profits are one thing but the idea of chasing $$ profits only is really just a part of the equation, happy staff are happy staff.

Enough of the ideas, you can get more by some simple Googling on staff incentive options and create a workplace that staff willingly come to work, make it productive, put in ideas and in all make the profits go wild BUT it requires $$ to be spent (often not much) to make a happy bunch of people.

Creating a business where you are the employer of choice may not be easy, but the results will be well worth it.

Stumble it!