Obsess about your employees
July 1st, 2009Really obsess about your employees. Look after them.
No seriously, the good guys aren’t hanging about, especially if you don’t look after them.
If I was hiring, things I’d offer are:
- Decent Health & Life Insurance
- Huge holidays, if you want to take 3 months off no pay, let’s figure out how to do that.
- Extra benefits for family guys
- Performance bonuses based on real business value that employees contribute
- Own time to build personal projects, whether related to business or not (including building personal brand, blogging, twitter)
- Flexible hours. What are rigid schedules for? Deliver on time, don’t care whether you do 1 hour or 2 hours.
- Flexible location, if you can do the work from Cambodia whilst you do some travel, let’s make that happen
- Want to build a startup out of work hours? All good, maybe we can sort you out with some equity or loans to give you a helping hand.
Oh and of course a reasonable wage.
Maybe this sounds like a pipe dream or maybe providing a dream job scenario will attract dream employees…
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Tags: contractors, employees, obsess, teams
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 5:55 pm. 
July 1st, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Why extra benefits for family guys? I’d expect that to build resentment in those who don’t have families.
July 1st, 2009 at 6:43 pm
@Brian A lady on twitter also pointed this out, why should one employee who contributes as equally as one another get perks over the other? You are right it would build resentment.
I should have been more defined – but my thinking was perks for families (when compared to other workplaces). Things like flexible hours, freedom of location (when applicable) lend themselves quite well to families but can be taken whether you have a family or not.
July 1st, 2009 at 6:48 pm
That makes more sense. I used to hear of cases where employees with families get priority for time off due to kids events. Haven’t heard that happening recently fortunately.
I’m happy for companies to organise events such as family day at the zoo. That doesn’t exclude those without families while making it welcoming to those with kids.
July 1st, 2009 at 8:50 pm
That still happens in some workplaces, I think organisations are well intentioned by wanting to include those with family stresses but it’s a classic case of solving one problem and creating another.
July 2nd, 2009 at 9:39 pm
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