Podcast 10 – Employee Review Time

Welcome to the Interactive Entrepreneur sponsored by Interactive Accountants. My name is Matthew Shiebler. I'm your host. And today we'll be doing a solo cast. It's July 5th. So hope everybody had a great holiday weekend and ready to get back into gear. So right now, this time of year it's summertime and things at the Interactive Accountants firm tend to slow down a little bit and maybe that's the case with your business as well.

So this time of year, what we try to do is make sure that we are providing feedback to our employees. So if you have employees and you haven't scheduled an annual review, or, you know, a semi-annual review. Perhaps now's the time to kick that into gear. So recently we just did our semi-annual reviews with our staff.

We try to meet with them at least twice a year, semi-annual review annual review. And then of course, along the way as we go and, and things come up, we try to provide feedback, but this semi-annual review is really a tool to help employees identify their strengths. Identify the areas where they could possibly improve themselves and then also identify some weaknesses where improvement is absolutely needed.

And the way I do it is very simple. You know, me guys, K I S S keep it simple. Stupid. Right. So first I start off by enunciating the employees strengths highlighting. Assets the, the, the things that they Excel at, you know what I mean? And I really want to get them pumped up and, you know, feeling good about themselves, you know, during this process so that we can then move on to things where, you know, it's not as easy to talk about.

So highlighting the employee strength. Enunciating those and letting them know that you are grateful and appreciate how they behave in those manners, I believe is the best way to start off a review. The next step in my semi-annual review, or maybe your annual review or even your quarterly review, whatever you, what, however frequency you choose for me, the next step is after we get through your assets, then we're moving on to areas where we can build now.

Building is things that employees, in my opinion do. Okay. right. Maybe it's not their best. Maybe it's not their worst. So these are things that we can build upon identifying areas of their job, the tasks that they do, where they can build upon things. Okay. Uh, an example may be that you have an employee who is decent at making sure the bills get paid on time, right?

Maybe this is an accounts payable person in your office. However you do note that maybe there are some areas where they can improve the payables process. Perhaps you are not using ACH to pay some of your vendors or most of your vendors. You're still cutting checks. That may be something that you can build upon where you know, this account's payable clerk always pays the bills on time and you're, you know, you've highlighted that in their assets that they're very punctu.

But now you wanna build upon it and say this skill, I think you can, you know, improve and build upon so that we're paying our vendors via ACH instead of, you know, checking checks with stamps in the mail. The final area of the employee review is obviously the one that, you know, the employee doesn't wanna talk about.

Right. But you, as the business owner, the entrepreneur. Have to talk about this is crucial and that's where you feel your employees are not performing well. And not only do you need to talk about this, but before you talk about it, you have to have some sort of game plan put written down, whatever it is put in motion, you know, about to be put in motion or some sort of tool that you can bring to the conversation where.

You can identify the employee's weakness and then also provide them with a tool or a training, or, you know, just even sitting down with them and showing them how to do it, how you want it done. And that's the best way on my opinion. To go about dealing with employee deficiencies. Okay. So let's talk about an example.

Let's say you have a sales clerk, a salesperson rather, excuse me, not a sales clerk as a salesperson. And let's say she is awesome at, you know, closing deals and stuff like that, but she is horrible about getting her expense reports in on time. And, you know, the accounting department is always complaining that they get this pile of receipts from this employee it's never organized.

And you know, the account's payable clerk has to spend like, you know, two hours sorting through this employee's mess and, and who wants to do that? Right? It's a waste of time. So what is it that you can do with this salesperson who obviously is a key member of your team? It's just, you. She, she can't get her act together for lack of a better word on getting her expense reports in on time and organized.

So you can do the following. You could say, okay, look, we are going to implement a new tool. It's called, you know, Expensify or name the app where they can just take pictures of the receipts and submit it electronically. Maybe that solves the problem. Or you could tell the employee, look, you know, If you are not going to submit your expense reimbursements on time.

And according to the way that we have requested you to do it, your expenses will no longer, you won't be able to get expense reimbursement. We will provide you with a stipend that we feel is sufficient enough to cover your expenses. And if that's not gonna cut the mustard, sorry, you're out of luck. And that may change the perception in the employee's mind saying, oh my God, well, what happens if I, you know, travel a thousand miles one month in my car and, and that's 500 bucks in mileage reimbursement, and you're only giving me, you know, a $400 travel statement, I'm out of pocket, a hundred bucks, maybe that changes the employees tune so that they get their act together and get these expense reimbursements on.

Now obviously that's an, just an example, and I'm sure there's some other caveats that go along with it. I'm not an attorney here, but the point being is that you have to not only identify the weakness, but also be there as a mentor to say, Hey, look, here are some tools I think that you can start using, or here are some rules that you have to abide by from now on.

Otherwise. You know, you're going to feel a loss in some way, shape or form. You know what I mean? Maybe it's a loss from getting promoted. Maybe it's a loss from not being getting, you know, not getting to that next senior level, that manager level, whatever it may be, you know what I mean? But there has to be a consequence.

So we did this recently in Interactive Accountants and we identified the assets. We identified the blocks that can be built upon. We identified the weaknesses and we provided our employees with some suggestions on how they can turn those weaknesses into maybe building blocks or even assets. So listen, everybody, I hope you enjoyed me, you know, going on a solo cast here for a little bit about reviewing our employees.

If you enjoyed this podcast, check out some of our past podcasts. We're available on Spotify and apple. And don't forget to check out Interactive Accountants.com. We are a full service CPA firm providing a complete accounting solution for entrepreneurs, just like you. Thanks everybody. Have a great one. Take care.