Promoting success

Katrina M. Boss has a system to find great employees and keep them.

The human resources manager at Invacare HCS — formerly Bargmann Management
LLC — says she’s looked for
the magic formula for finding
star employees, and the most
reliable trait she’s identified is
certain internal drive.

To determine if a potential
employee has that drive to
succeed, the first place you
have to look is at the job candidate’s work history.

“Even if they worked at a gas
station, if they’ve moved their
way up to manager of a gas
station, they’re someone who
wants to learn more about the
processes or wants to develop
professionally,” she says.

Once you’ve vetted someone’s work history, the next
step is the interview. Boss says
that one of the most common
things she hears from job candidates is, “I want a company I
can grow with.” While it’s true
that many employees leave
jobs because there was no
opportunity for advancement,
you have to determine whether
that statement is simply lip
service.

“We try to dig a little bit
deeper and find out why there
wasn’t an opportunity,” she
says. “Was there not opportunity because they weren’t
applying themselves, or was
there truly not opportunity?
Because in some companies,
there isn’t; you hit a brick wall,
and that’s as far as it will go.”

But there may have been
other reasons an employee
wasn’t promoted. To determine whether a candidate
took the initiative to grow
within his or her previous company, Boss considers
three components: attitude,
productivity and attendance.
She digs to find out an
employee’s performance in
those three areas, because if
the person’s prior employer
really did limit upward movement, she knows Invacare
HCS offers an environment
that will allow them to grow.

“If you give us those three
things, opportunities will come
your way,” she says.

The three key components
continue to be measuring
posts for employee success
even after someone is hired.
Boss keeps tabs on attendance, attitude and production for Invacare HCS’ nearly 100 employees. And while attendance is self-explanatory and
productivity can be measured
by call volume, as well as length
of calls and time between calls,
measuring attitude can be more
difficult. To do this, Boss looks
at how an employee handles
stress in his or her job.

This is important because
the higher someone moves up
in the company, the more
important stress management
becomes. If you can’t prove
that you can handle your current workload, you won’t be
given additional responsibilities, Boss says.

“We’ve found a successful
formula in making people
prove themselves before they
get promoted,” she says. “We
don’t promote them and hope
they do well — we ask them
to do well first, then the promotion will come.”

The process begins when the
company communicates the
standard career path to
employees. Boss says it takes
at least six months for new
employees to learn their job
and the company well enough
to prepare them for what
would happen at the next
level. So the company has
established a six-month time
frame to give employees an
idea of when they can start
thinking about a promotion.

“After they have been here for
six months, that’s when they
can apply for that senior-level
position,” she says. “We give
them those steppingstones.”

By checking measurable
metrics before and after you
hire, then giving your employees a set timetable for promotion, you can do a better job of
keeping your star performers,
Boss says.

Be candid

As Invacare HCS grows, more
than 20 of its nearly 100
employees have been promoted
from their original posts, says
Katrina M. Boss.

However, when an employee
receives a promotion, it can create resentment with co-workers,
says the company’s human
resources manager.

To soften these potentially difficult situations, Boss constantly
has candid communications
with employees to help them
understand why someone else
is being promoted and they are
not.

“If someone comes to us and
says, ‘I want to grow within the
company,’ and they’re not meeting one of those three expectations that we set forth, we’re
very direct in communications
to let them know why they aren’t
growing,” she says.

By being direct, you may
uncover issues that employees
didn’t know about that are holding them back.

“Sometimes those shortcomings are blind spots to people,”
Boss says. “Especially if it’s an
attitude issue, they may not realize how they’re coming across
or how people perceive them.
So we have that conversation
with them, then they understand
it and they’re more aware,
because it’s hard to fix the problem that you’re unaware of.”

If an employee has problems
with productivity or attendance,
Boss presents hard facts that are
tough to argue against. But if
there are less immediately identifiable issues, such as stress
management, a bad attitude or
poor people skills, you’ll be
helping both your employee and
your company by bringing those
issues to his or her attention.

HOW TO REACH: Invacare HCS, (330) 645-8200 or www.homecarecollection.com