Here Are the Ways Your Employees Are Losing You Money

Keeping your employees happy

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Every business owner is concerned about the money their business is making. The highest cost of most businesses, of course, is in employment. So you need to make sure you’re not overspending here. Is that possible? Just check out this article for the biggest costs involved in employment.

Being recruited in the first place

It’s a truth, but it’s a harsh one. Business owners often hire full-time employees that they don’t really need. You need to consider the fact that the costs of recruiting an employee in the first place aren’t negligible. The average company will spend thousands of dollars recruiting a single employee, even if they’re not fully aware of it at the time.

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You may have thought that your startup needed a full-time financial controller, or an IT expert on-site at all times. But this is true for very few companies. If your office only has, say, less than fifty employees and deals mainly in small-scale projects? Then it’s highly unlikely you need such positions to be filled five days a week. This is why you should consider looking into outsourcing instead of full-on employment. You can get the job done as and when you need it. Otherwise, you may have employees who can’t do anything but twiddle their thumbs for most of the week.

Too high a salary

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Woah, there! This is a controversial area if ever there was one. But let’s face it: we’ve all met people, often people who work in the same office as us, who are paid way too much for what they do. Of course, you don’t want to go cutting everyone’s salaries just because you want to make a few extra dollars. You can’t just cut an employee’s earnings because you’ve suddenly come to the conclusion that you’re paying them too much. You have to provide a reason, and if that’s your only reason, they’re might be eligible to take legal action against you.

Really, it depends how high “high” really is. The chances are that this particular problem won’t affect you very much. The kinds of businesses that really need to deal with this problem are the massive, multi-billion dollar companies. The ones who pay their executives millions a year. If that’s not you, I’d suggest tackling your problem another way.

Not even turning up

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In a perfect world, employees would never get sick. Heck, in a perfect world, no-one would ever get sick. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure no-one would ever actually have to work in a perfect world. So let’s dispense with the hypothetical utopias and leave it at this: sometimes, employees simply can’t be at work. That’s not great, but it’s something employers will just have to deal with.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t worry about the costs that you incur when employees aren’t at their desk. Even if you pay your employees in accordance to attendance, a missing employee can still cost you revenue. (Paying according to attendance would be in contrast to, say, a fixed salary. This technically costs you more because you’re still paying the employee despite their absence!) Of course, people won’t turn up to work for several reasons. Sickness, family emergencies, inclement weather. Whatever the reason, you should be tracking absence and incurred costs via absence management.

Unhappiness and stress

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When we think about employees “costing us money”, we often sound accusatory. We speak about the problems that could be avoided by the employee, or as though the employee is the problem just because they exist. Basically, we tend to shift blame towards them. But the things that really cost your business are the costs that go unnoticed. They’re the costs that come with a loss in productivity. And I’m not talking about obvious losses in productivity. I’m talking about the fact that employees are rarely working at their full potential. Why? Because so many employees, in pretty much every industry, are unhappy and stressed out.

Many business owners choose not to tackle these problems. They see unhappiness and stress as simply part of the working life. After all, we can’t pretend that every employee in our company is working for us out of sheer passion. Most of them are there because they need the paycheck. With that in mind, aren’t unhappiness and stress inevitable? Why try to fight them?

Fact: a happy worker is a productive worker. A given employee doesn’t have to be in love with the job itself in order to enjoy coming to work. A business owner should always be working towards making the workplace an enjoyable and less stressful place to be. I’m not saying you should turn the office into a play park, or into some Zen-like modern area. But there’s always something you can do to improve things here.

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