How to increase profits

What's crazy about our business's crazed obsession with profits over wellness is that they don't even do that well.

Right now, there is a big debate as to how staff should be treated in order to best increase profits. Many executives fear the sensitivity, laziness and inefficiency that appears to be spreading throughout our workforce as if it were some far conceived mystery beyond anyone's ability to solve.

Check out our section on how to treat staff, it is a summary it doesn't really matter how staff are. What matters is that they are given the training, resources and time to do their jobs. Then showing signs of respect or even praise when they produce well backed by showing signs of disappointment when they don't produce can then be effective.

Beyond the questions of how to treat staff many corporations struggle with profits. But just as with stress in any other area, those areas that we stress about, we can too easily make worse.

As a result, companies can stress so hard to save a penny that they lose millions.

Take for example the Fukashima powerplant in Japan. During its construction the owners had a tough decision to make. They could either increase their budget by about 10% to improve the storage and way that the nuclear waste was made, to both help guard against possible larger tsunamis and earthquakes that were already known to have taken place not too far away... Or they could “save” that money to be able to brag to their boards and public about how much they saved.

As we all know, the costs that that decision has me that company and our world can never fully be calculated. Especially since even today we are still dealing partially with that crisis. And the owners? Many of them, out of shame, committed suicide.

We think that profits are results of how much work we can squeeze out of our overworked staff, spending as little as possible in every area. The staff can’t produce as well because the Internet connection is too slow? But think of the savings! Our answer to pleas from overworked staff is to give them more work? But think of the profits!

How we actually increase profits is more simple than we would care to admit. And it's covered in our crash course in management page.

The problem is that most managers will count a couple videos or printouts as "training," they will count having purchased many of the tools as fulfillment of the resources, and will also count having no limits to the workload of their staff as "making the best use of their time."

How to increase profits actually deals with mastering the basics, and responding to errors or problems with reinforcing them.

For example, if the staff member makes an error the first question management should have is, "was this appropriately covered with readily accessible videos and training material?" If not, then it should be made. If so, then they should be simply made to review it.

Like the story of the river, it's the solutions that matter, which in the case of a corporation will always be the training above all else.

If you have a lead who is in charge of training of the staff, and yet after months and years no effective training materials appear then you simply have an illusionist on your hands who believes they need to keep everyone else untrained to look good and attack the hard workers, while pushing even more and more work on to their painful shoulders.

The next question management should ask, once they guarantee that that staff member has the training to do their job is then, "did they have the appropriate resources to do their job?" If no, then purchase it or at least something that can do the same job. A company that’s building up may have a hard time purchasing state-of-the-art materials, but this is probably where most businesses lose a lot of profits with faulty equipment, Internet speeds, security etc. If the staff has to stop, slow down, wait, search for tools they need to do their work, then management has failed them. If the staff members are not returning items to where they belong, then it is management's duty to train them on that as well.

The next question that management has to ask is, "are they given appropriate time to do the work?"

What most managers make the mistake on here is the thought that all humans are equal, they've all have equal training, resources and support to do their jobs. "The staff at location B is complaining there overwhelmed at 60% theoretical capacity while the staff that location a is happily operating at 120% capacity, clearly we need to make location B do more work!"

Notice how this last example that manager failed to ask any of the three basic questions. If staff are not properly trained in how to do their jobs no amount of duress will be low to make them "work more." If they don't have the appropriate resources and training of on how to use them you can expect defeat in the battle of increasing efficiency.

Efficiency, competency and ability are all relative as stress is relative. And if staff members are not appropriately trained on how to do their work then all they will be able to do is stress and put even more burden on the few that are carrying the entire corporation. It doesn't matter what another location can or cannot do, especially if you haven't checked in with them to see how they're doing with such a high workload.

It's almost astounding how serious, complex, stressed out, overwhelmed management can get without ever asking the fundamental questions of operation.

Training, resources and time.

With training and resources secured the staff will be able to produce more and with less stress, with better quality and less liability. Time then is not something that can be controlled but is simply an indicator of the first two of the three.

If the team seems to be struggling most managers will try to light a fire under their asses to work harder, while completely missing that half of them were never trained all, many of the doctors spend an hour a day staring at a screen waiting for the super slow system to respond, flowcharts, room and other organizational resources were never even established or purposely destroyed by illusionists, and no workload limits have been put in place, leading to majority of the staff burning out and planning to leave literally within weeks, while management continues to think everything is fine and then feels blindsided as more and more people leave.

When management is not properly trained on those three key items, their job will appear to become infinitely complex as more and more work appears to fall on their shoulders when untrained staff simply can't carry their own weight.

Like in the combat of wellness it's critically important to know who one's actual allies are, who the illusionist and enemies are. An easy hint is looking at who was actually getting more work done as they are generally made out to be the black sheep of the packs. Who is only doing their jobs "in the hopes of being promoted to management" and who is hurting that they're not able to serve more customers? Who will happily turn procedures into informational consultations? Who is quick to create an us versus them environment? Who is at the ear of managers securing their own relationship as the rest of the corporation dies?

Many corporations are even afraid of hiring people with degrees. A few police precincts also run into this problem, just like most corporations. As the highly trained people seem more prone to agitation, disagreement and eventually leave. The problem is not with them but with management as it is those trained people that we should be consulting with. Not the happy-go-lucky higher up manager who was just promoted from working the phones, or their longtime "loyalty."

Every business creates a product or service. How that product or service is delivered should be up to the people who are most trained to deliver them. Everyone else should be organized on how to make that possible while some of their more lofty dreams and goals should be put on the back burner until at least possible steps can be made towards them.

Nothing above is groundbreaking yet so many corporations have such a hard time with it, because of ego. We want to think that we know the best way, we want to think that we alone know the best path and everyone else better suck it up. And then find ourselves bewildered as our companies slowly fall apart, blaming unemployment or a host of other reasons. The truth is that not being part of a society, no matter how much one is making from unemployment, is the most depressing thing possible and people do generally like to be a part of something. But if that something doesn't give them enough training so they can feel good making a difference or getting a good product, isn't given the proper resources to do their job with unrealistic time expectations that not even Chuck Norris could easily handle, and continually met with small attacks form the illusionists of that corporation, then it will be hard to bring them back to work.

Of course when unemployment ended many people were forced to go back to work because they had no other choice. That's not a healthy way to build personnel, "because they had no other choice."

This may sound crazy but it is more than possible to create a working environment where people can enjoy coming to work, even if they're a janitor at a grocery store.

A few years back I actually went to work for a Harris Teeter in Raleigh, North Carolina. I was hired as a floater and that location had been known for its less than unsavory conditions in its restrooms. Many of the staff, for that reason, chose to let their bladders fall apart than to use them. I happen to have been highly trained in cleaning protocols and made those bathrooms cleaner than they had ever seen. I'm not gonna lie, the amount of praise I was met with was intoxicating. Though never nearly as intoxicating as the praise I have gotten from my massage therapy clients later on.

I was soon asked to train a new recruit on cleaning the bathrooms which I'm pretty sure convinced him that he had finally hit rock bottom at the “old age of 19 years old.” But we got those bathrooms so clean and even used the stores own probiotic cleaner, in 5 minutes flat each, that he too became intoxicated by the kick ass result he was able to get and walked through those aisles with pride as other people looked up to him.

There are many tough jobs out there, but bad management will make a tough job unbearable. Bad management will equally be responsible for suicide rates in their industries, and all for missing the three key aspects of profits. Impressively enough, many managers will respond to obvious pleas of help from their top workers, and meet them with judgment, punishment and an increased workload.

The choice is ours. We can either make more money than we thought was possible or we can continue to watch our staff fall apart, our liabilities increase, our turnover increase, our Workmen's Comp. cases increase and so on. Or we can simply do the basics of management.

I think we've all spent enough time struggling and it is time for each of us to become interventional warriors of peace in our own fields and lives. What's funny about staff that speak up, is this not just for themselves they speak up, but the things they speak up about tend to be key areas of profit loss as well.

This may be a slightly embarrassing page to read because of how basic it is, yet how rarely you truly see it applied. Blame it on stress blinding us from the common denominator basics and let's all get back to work.

The final truth is that no matter how tough things may be in your organization, it is easier to turn around the knee may be willing to believe. But the first step of any twelve-step program is being willing to recognize that you have a problem. And just maybe, part of that problem has been your own lack of training and management.

And that’s why we’re here, to help everyone begin the path back upwards with our “revolution” of the basics.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels