Employees—Assets or Expenses?

Expense. A cost or charge.
Asset. A useful or valuable item/person that one owns.

If you have not already, you need to stop and examine how you perceive the employees at your company. The way you see your employees affects your employee engagement.

Expenses

What do you do with expenses in your company? You look for ways to reduce them. When you consider your employees an expense, which they are of course, you strive to have the least amount of employees needed to do the greatest amount of work possible. It may sound a little heartless to consider an employee an expense but when it comes down to it, technically, they are.

As a common rule, a healthy company should spend less than a third of its gross income to pay its employees. This is why, if a company doesn't bring in as much income as it was hoping, it typically has layoffs. With layoffs come lower morale, talent loss, and lost productivity. While layoffs aren't the only way to deal with a overextended budget, frequently that is what's used.

Assets

The skills and intellectual abilities your employees possess is something you cannot own. Additionally, since these items are intangible, you cannot assign an exact value to them. For these reasons, employees are not true assets.

However intangible, your employees still possess value. Through their ingenuity, they can solve problems, increase efficiency and skyrocket sales. Additionally, the longer an employee is with your company, the more company knowledge they possess. As they complete tasks and overcome problems, they strengthen and hone their skills. So, if you consider an asset something or someone that appreciates over time, then an employee is definitely an asset.

Treating employees as assets

Treating employees as assets can pay dividends to you in the future and need not incur expense. Here are some ways you can show your employees that you value them as assets to your company.

• Take time to get to know your employees and their teams
• Reward the sharing of company knowledge
• Increase your communication
• Provide added reassurance during times of change and transition
• Encourage feedback from all levels of your company on how you can improve your service
• Listen to the feedback you receive
• Make commitments and keep them
• Invite everyone to increase their quality of work
• Support the initiatives your employees are working on
• Improve your training programs
• Teach your managers how to provide feedforward
• Encourage creativity

What do you think?

Are employees expenses or assets? How has treating them one way or the other affected your company? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Exceed Expectations

Part 5 of 7: Exceed expectations

7 Ways to Improve Patient Satisfaction

To thrive in today's economy, we have to go beyond just delivering what is expected. Being good is not good enough anymore. In a day and age where we can order pizza on our phones and have it delivered to our door, it can be difficult to exceed expectations. Meeting even standard expectations can be difficult when staff is short and budgets are tight. Here are a few simple ways you can move your expectation meter from hmmm to WOW. 

Low-hanging fruit

Look through your survey results and gather up all of the comments associated with scores three and below. Sort the comments into groups based off of level of difficulty to correct issues discussed. Start by focusing on resolving the negative feedback that is easiest to fix. Quick wins can give you stamina to work on harder-to-resolve problems. By saying you should focus on the low-hanging fruit, it isn't to say that you shouldn't put priority on difficult issues. Clearing up complex problems can definitely take your patient's expectations from good to great in a big way and is essential in operating a successful organization.

Under and over

Remember the old adage, "under promise, over deliver." It's far better to surprise and delight your patients with things they aren't expecting than to promise something and not deliver on it. Again, a word of caution: under promising isn't an excuse for not pushing yourself to do your best. Striving for greatness should always be your goal.

Create "WOW" moments

Simply thinking about simple ways you can do more for your patients than they are expecting is sometimes all it takes. For instance, remembering a patient's birthday or bringing along a sympathy card to a patient who has recently lost a pet.

A family member of a patient said this about her father's nurse, "One nurse knows Dad likes patriotic songs and has downloaded, 'God Bless America' on her cell phone. When he's upset, she hands it to him and it calms him right down."

These are the types of simple opportunities you can take to go beyond your patient's expectations and provide them with a special experience.

For more ways to improve patient satisfaction, visit part 6: Lose Wait.