Your Personnel Need Your Personal Attention

In many of my columns since 2005, I have presented the importance of turning your parts and accessories inventories with the suggestion that you should achieve as high a turn as possible considering several factors. For this month’s column, I am suggesting that you achieve a low turn of another important asset — your personnel. Yes, personnel are considered an expense with respect to your financial statement. However, as a parts manager/director and as a consultant, I view personnel as an asset — or a liability.

Your frontline parts and accessory associates interact with your customers. Most people like to establish relationships with the employees of businesses with which they do business. I was in the local branch of my bank today, and I felt comfortable when several of the employees greeted me as Mr. Selway or Mel. Assuming this is the atmosphere you want to establish and maintain in your RV business, then perhaps some of the points in this month’s column might assist you in your efforts.

NOTE: Though the job positions referenced in this column are in the parts and accessories department, the concepts are applicable in any part of your business.

Where To Start?

Before you solicit applications for a position in your parts and accessory department, have you prepared for efficiently and effectively handling those applicants? Do you have a detailed job description for the position? Does that job description reflect the current duties and responsibilities of the position? What qualifications will you require for persons applying for this position? How do you present the image of your RV business to the customer so that the applicants know what is to be expected of them? (e.g., Do you operate a dirt floor service department? Are your bathrooms clean and sanitary?)

Do you have test documents that can be used to determine the job knowledge of each applicant? Or do you accept the work history listed in the applicant’s résumé? Early in my career as a parts manager/director, I learned that just because a person claims job knowledge based on years of experience, it doesn’t validate their actual experience. I suggest that you have a few job skills tests that require each applicant to demonstrate how to research a work order request or research a customer request for a specific item on their RV, especially for a brand of RV that you sell and/or service. By evaluating these research tests for elapsed time and accuracy, you can establish a baseline of each applicant’s job knowledge. This assists you in making your decision to hire or not.

How does the applicant present herself? Is she comfortable talking with the interviewer? If the job position for which she is applying will be dealing with people (customers, technicians, supplier representatives, etc.), then soft skills could be an important trait to include in your evaluation. If she is applying for the position of shipping/receiving or inventory verification, then perhaps the soft skills are not as important.

After the Hire

Once you have offered the advertised job to the applicant and he has accepted it, it is important to retain him. I suggest reading a book by D. Michael Abrashoff, a retired U.S. Navy captain. Though he has a series of books on management, I refer you to his first book titled: “It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques From the Best Damn Ship in the Navy.”

I recommend this book because most of it is about managing personnel. Unlike our retail world where we can seek out applicants and decide if we want them as part of our crew, in Captain Abrashoff’s situation, he had to take whoever the U.S. Navy sent him. Just to pique your desire to possibly read this book, I will sum it up by saying that he took one of the worst-performing ships in the entire U.S. Navy and made it the best. He did this by managing his crew through training, support and caring about each of them. I include this quote from the book:

“Captains need to see the ship from the crew’s perspective. They need to make it easy and rewarding for crew members to express themselves and their ideas, and they need to figure out how and when to delegate responsibility.”

I suggest that you review how you interact with your associates. Each is an individual and those individuals have different views of life. What excites one person might be of no interest to another. By learning about each of your associates, you can increase their desire to stay with your team.

These are some of the techniques/tools that you might apply in your efforts to reduce personnel turnover. Do you:

• Thank an associate for suggesting and completing a project?*
• Acknowledge an associate for handling a difficult task successfully or in a unique way?
• Celebrate associates’ birthdays or other major events in their lives?*
• Determine what training an associate might require and schedule that training?
• Ensure that each job function has a detailed written procedure to assist personnel in performing that function efficiently and correctly?*
• Create a daily to-do list of department maintenance tasks?*
• Ask your associates if there is a better way to do what they are doing?*

*For more information on some of these suggested techniques/tools — ask me about ideas such as Scott’s Door, associate birthdays or my first day as a manager in each dealership — please contact me.

Congratulating & Counseling

Occasionally, an associate will turn in their resignation. Usually, this surprises their manager or the business owner. This should not be a surprise. More importantly, it should happen very infrequently. If communications between managers and staff are frequent and effective, the frequency of employees resigning is minimal.

A daily to-do list is a good tool because by assigning tasks to specific individuals or a group of individuals, you can evaluate their performance on a daily cycle. These daily evaluations provide the opportunity to congratulate or to counsel and could reduce personnel turnover because you and your associates know exactly how each is doing — every day. And you have the chance to decide if an associate requires some special training, either technical or social.

Scheduled formal evaluations might also enhance the quality of and the retention of your associates. As a manager/director, I directed each associate to evaluate themselves and I also evaluated them. We compared our scores on each point. For any topics on which we scored differently, we discussed the pros/cons of each score and agreed on a common value. Where training was needed to assist the associate to improve their performance, that training was scheduled. And the employees appreciated their involvement in the evaluation process.

Communication

As with most aspects of life, communication is key. Keep your doors and ears open so that you can listen to your associates and learn how to make your department and your team better. Please feel comfortable reaching out if you want to communicate with me to discuss the contents of this column.

To paraphrase Captain Abrashoff: It’s your RV business!