Why You Shouldn’t Let Your Employees Run Your Business

“You can’t keep your best people forever.” – Reid Hoffman, cofounder, LinkedIn

Can you relate to this?

How did it feel when your best employee left? Did it make you worry about where you were going to find a replacement?

How much time and money your business would lose while training the new employee to take over?

Well, this is the reality of most businesses across all industries.

You are not alone.

Employees come and go.

It makes sense that you aren’t highly dependent on them.

So, the question now is what’s the solution?

A solid process.

Having a process in place… instead of just hoping your new employees will fit into the role.

A solid process eliminates your dependency on excellent employees. And it will help you focus on what matters to your business… growing.

But, that’s not all.

There are more ways in which a process can help your business.

Recruitment

How do you recruit a dispatcher or the person handling route planning in your company?

Do you advertise and/or use staffing agencies, in-house recruiters, and job database aggregators?

Whether you use any or all of them, you’ll agree that it hurts your coin purse heavily.

Not to mention the time involved in conducting the recruitment process, such as:

• Reviewing resumes,
• Contacting and shortlisting candidates,
• Conducting interviews,
• Pre-employment assessment tests, and
• Other staffing related tasks.

“Finding the right match requires time and attention, and it’s something even busy managers need to make time for,” said Max Messmer, chairman and CEO of Robert Half International and author of the Human Resources Kit for Dummies.

And then there’s still no guarantee you’ll get the right fit.

A wrong hire can cost your company two and a half times the person’s compensation, according to a report by Dice, a popular job portal.

It’s quite possible that, after a while, you may need to hunt for another replacement again.

That means you again need to go through the entire process. And it will lead to:

• Loss of productivity,
• Extra effort, and
• Most importantly, hefty expenses.

Do you think that you can survive in the industry for long doing it this way?

This is another example of where a solid process will prevent all this damage.

Let’s look at an example of a courier company.

You can cut down these worries and expenses through process-driven route planning.

Easy with automatic route planning software.

For example, Route4Me automates 95% of your route planning tasks.

You just need to upload your list of addresses that need to be visited and the number of drivers you have. And, within seconds, you’ll have a perfectly optimized route with 100% accuracy.

You can then share the route with your drivers automatically as well.

So, when you can automate your route planning, do you really need to worry about recruitment costs?

Training

Have you ever hired an employee who learned everything about your business and industry in a single day?

Highly unlikely…

…maybe even impossible!

Right?

You’ll agree that it takes time for a newly hired employee to start producing great results. And that also depends on how well you train them.

Now, calculate what you’ll pay until he or she generates the same results of your former employee.

We can understand this better with an example.

Let’s say you recruited an employee to do route planning at $30/hour. He or she also needs to go through one month of training to learn about your route planning requirements.

That means it will cost you $4,800 ($30 x 160 hours) to train the employee in a month.

And that’s not all.

You can’t expect 100% production during the training period.

You can’t even expect full productivity until at least three months into the job.

Now add in the training manager’s wages.

If your manager does the training, then add extra cost due to their loss of production as well.

Now, that’s an assumption.

The more training time that is required, the higher the cost will be. And it’s not a one-time expense.

Your new employee needs continuous training to produce exceptional results. Also, your requirements may change over time.

They need to keep abreast of any updates through continuous training.

Can you afford such expenses? After all, you are in the business of making money, not losing money.

However, there is a way you can ensure these expenses are low.

You can do this by putting your training process on auto-pilot.

Or better yet… have a system that’s very easy to use.

For example, Route4Me doesn’t need your employees to go through rigorous training.

Your employee doesn’t even need previous route planning knowledge. He or she doesn’t even need a dedicated computer to manage Route4Me.

The employee can plan routes, customize it and track drivers from their smartphone if needed.

Moreover, Route4Me has a team of dedicated onboarding specialists to help your business transition from your current route planning process (or lack of).

We have a five-step onboarding process, as follows:

• Step 1: Contact a Route4Me expert.
• Step 2: We will set up your account.
• Step 3: Send all your customer addresses to your Route4Me Routing Expert.
• Step 4: The Routing Expert will import your customer information into your account.
• Step 5: The Routing Expert will create the first few routes for you. They will walk you and your team through the entire application with live screen sharing.

The best part is that this entire onboarding program is free of cost.

Now compare this to your hefty training expenses.

Do you still think that being employee-dependent is great for your business?

Knowledge

It takes a lot of time and effort to gain extensive knowledge in your industry.

Information about:

• Your industry
• The areas in which you operate
• Your service offerings
• Your USP
• Every other small detail about your business that can help them do their job correctly.

And this may take a couple of months or even years.

Also, every business wants to grow faster and so do you.

Coming back to our Courier company example:

• That means that you need to cover more routes to serve more customers.
• Your employee will have to keep learning more in order to optimize larger routes.

Thus, today your employee may only need to optimize individual routes. But, tomorrow, they may need to plan multi-depot and multi-vehicle routes.

This makes your dispatcher highly knowledgeable and a key part of your organization.

So, what if this seasoned employee takes all this knowledge with them when leaving your company?

The learning process will start all over again. This will continue until your new employee becomes an effective replacement…

…taking your entire route planning process back to the basics again.

But, you never need to worry about this if you go for route planning software. It does almost all of the work for you.

Also, the software factors in the latest traffic and weather conditions for optimized routes.

So, you don’t need to scratch your head when preparing a route that avoids:

• High-traffic areas,
• Time of peak traffic,
• Under-construction roads, and
• Roads to avoid during sunrise.

Moreover, it helps you plan routes in several other ways, such as:

• Planning routes at the very last minute… even during the middle of the day,
• Adding specific constraints, such as weight capacity and time windows,
• Letting customers know your driver’s ETA, and
• Instantly finding a customer’s location.

With such software, the knowledge stays with your company.

Overtime

Your route planning process may get messy when your dispatcher leaves.

Other employees might have to pick up the slack for a while.

Thus, extra work shifts might be required until you find a good replacement.

This means you need to pay overtime.

You also can’t expect your other employee to do the route planning as well as like your former dispatcher did.

There’s no guarantee the planned routes are optimized… leading to your drivers covering longer routes unnecessarily… working overtime as well.

They might all be around the same location, drive through high-traffic areas and so on.

But, route planning software can solve this problem with ease. This is because it makes your route planning process independent of employee expertise. Even if your best employee leaves, you are assured that it won’t affect you.

So, what’s your view now about being an employee-centric organization versus a process-centric one?

Have any questions? Let us know in the comments section below.