Recently, one of my friend asked me for a suggestion on how to fire her one of the experienced employee (let’s call him Bob). Since the question was really interesting, I wanted to get more information about this issue. After some discussion with her, I figured out that her issue was completely different than how to fire someone. Actually, she was unable to use Bob’s strength to strengthen her team, and hence, she was considering Bob’s output negligent. Bob was with the company for several years, and she felt that his growth was getting stagnant because he is always looking for stability, and wouldn’t grab the next opportunity of growth. Thus, in this blog post I am going to provide you with some insight on how to use employees like Bob to strengthen your team, instead of firing them.

Improve loyalty of your team: In today’s world, where the world is changing every day, we should still value loyalty as an employer. Every company needs a loyal workforce, who are committed to their mission, their customers, and their work. And this is what you will get with your stability seeking employees. They are always loyal with the company, which they work for, since they connect their job stability with the company’s continuous performance. If used correctly, these employees can become the story tellers of your company and its culture to your new employees. Thus, as a manager you can use these employees to mentor your newer workforce to be loyal, and hence, reducing your turnover rate. And why not? Using these employees, you can build the strength of your group by deepening their knowledge of the company, its goals, history, and performance. This approach can create a butterfly effect, and maybe, you can create an entire workforce of loyal employees.

Develop stronger strategic vision: Security seeking employees want the organization to succeed in whatever it does. By doing this, they are increasing their job security. As a manager, you should be seeing this approach as their strengths, and involve these employees in strategic decision making. Because these employees value the organization, they are likely to provide you with some inputs, which has the organization’s interests at its heart. Since these employees are seeking stability with the company, they are most likely to be far-sighted, and they will try to see beyond the short-sighted turf battles. Use this to your advantage, and consistently ask them “What is the best thing to do for the company in the long run?”.

Improve your team’s efficiency: Stability seeking employees are probably not likely to reinvent many wheels. If they have worked for the company for some amount of time, then they might know how the process works, and how to follow it. This approach can make them highly effective workers, since they spend less time in questioning the current system, and spend more time in performing the task. Obviously, not all the time you want a “Yes man” in your team; but for some of the repetitive tasks, you might want to use these employees to quickly finish these tasks. Just make sure that you don’t keep on giving the same tasks to the same employee, because no one knows how to do it. In this way, you will be not only increasing the dependency on one employee, but you will stop that employee from growing. If used correctly, stability seeking employees can reduce any distractions, and improve your team’s efficiency.

Do you have any other ideas through which you can use the strengths of your stability seeking employees?

Thanks – Bhavin Gandhi