[Opinion]
I was reading an article in the Sunday Hartford Courant about two types of employees “Hikers” and “Campers.” Inc. writes,
I see this as along the lines of “work at home” movement.
You picture 20 or 30 somethings in a cutthroat environment stabbing everyone else in the back to get ahead. This was written by the founder of a garage door company.
Okay here is my take on “Hikers and Campers” if you have a company where you have limited skills for the job, yeah go-getters make sense. But what about an engineering firm? Do they want hikers? What about a company where you have to learn a special skill? Do they want hikers? While a company that installs garage doors and openers they don’t need special skills the new employee can learn the job in a couple of hours.
But do you want to hire a person who is using jobs to increase their skills by hopping from one company to another. You train the new employee and then they jump ship to a new company after a year or two.
Before I retired and before the last company bought us started bring in job shoppers for engineering work but they quickly found out how impracticable that was for the type of work we did. It took four or five years to get a control system out the door. Three years of engineering work and a year for manufacturing of the system. The company hired job shoppers to design the system and then let them go. What the company found out was when problems came up during the manufacturing of the system no one knew how to correct problems because those that designed the system were no longer there.
Hikers didn’t work for us, we needed “campers.”
The same thing for manufacturing, you cannot have “work at home” for retail sales, and you cannot have “work-at-home” on a factory floor. We were in New Britain CT and engineering was on site. Well one company that bought us out moved engineering up to Windsor CT and then moved it back to New Britain. Why? Because they found when engineering was on site when manufacturing had a problem the engineer walked down the hall and out to the shop floor to look at what the problem was. But when it was in Windsor, the engineer got into his car and drove 40 minutes to us and said “Oh that goes like this!” and drove back to Windsor. So the shop, maybe ten, fifteen employees sat around twiddling their thumps for almost an hour. Do that four or five times a week and the idle hours add up! Well our English corporate master quickly moved engineering back.
The same thing is true about “work-at-home” for manufacturing jobs, you need everyone together in one building. Work-at-home might be okay for an accounting job or other “paper-pushing” jobs but for manufacturing jobs you need everyone together, we need “campers.”
[/Opinion]
I was reading an article in the Sunday Hartford Courant about two types of employees “Hikers” and “Campers.” Inc. writes,
Hikers and Campers
Hikers are competitive employees. They want to make more money, they want to have a stake in the outcome, they want to grow, they want to win.
Campers are comfortable employees. They want stability and the certainty of what they're going to make--typically hourly or a fixed salary--and they're happy with it.
1. Create a top employee club
Hikers love awards, any kind of recognition that they're at the top of their game. At A1, we have a Pinnacle Club: an exclusive club for top technicians who achieve over $1.2 million of annual sales and other key performance indicators.
2. Identify the 'hidden hikers.'
I will bet that you have a few employees who are hikers, but they haven't stepped up because your culture doesn't acknowledge and motivate them. The key is more one-on-ones with your employees and learning more about their dreams. Then, get them to dream bigger: How can they get what they want by being top performers at your company? Reminder: Performance pay is a must.
This hiring approach doesn't just work for us, it has also worked for many other companies. For example, a friend in Portland who runs a garage door company wanted to grow his business. The first thing I got him to do was to implement performance pay during his worst month ever.
Okay here is my take on “Hikers and Campers” if you have a company where you have limited skills for the job, yeah go-getters make sense. But what about an engineering firm? Do they want hikers? What about a company where you have to learn a special skill? Do they want hikers? While a company that installs garage doors and openers they don’t need special skills the new employee can learn the job in a couple of hours.
But do you want to hire a person who is using jobs to increase their skills by hopping from one company to another. You train the new employee and then they jump ship to a new company after a year or two.
Before I retired and before the last company bought us started bring in job shoppers for engineering work but they quickly found out how impracticable that was for the type of work we did. It took four or five years to get a control system out the door. Three years of engineering work and a year for manufacturing of the system. The company hired job shoppers to design the system and then let them go. What the company found out was when problems came up during the manufacturing of the system no one knew how to correct problems because those that designed the system were no longer there.
Hikers didn’t work for us, we needed “campers.”
The same thing for manufacturing, you cannot have “work at home” for retail sales, and you cannot have “work-at-home” on a factory floor. We were in New Britain CT and engineering was on site. Well one company that bought us out moved engineering up to Windsor CT and then moved it back to New Britain. Why? Because they found when engineering was on site when manufacturing had a problem the engineer walked down the hall and out to the shop floor to look at what the problem was. But when it was in Windsor, the engineer got into his car and drove 40 minutes to us and said “Oh that goes like this!” and drove back to Windsor. So the shop, maybe ten, fifteen employees sat around twiddling their thumps for almost an hour. Do that four or five times a week and the idle hours add up! Well our English corporate master quickly moved engineering back.
The same thing is true about “work-at-home” for manufacturing jobs, you need everyone together in one building. Work-at-home might be okay for an accounting job or other “paper-pushing” jobs but for manufacturing jobs you need everyone together, we need “campers.”
[/Opinion]
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