Many businesses of all sizes in the pavement sweeping industry offer a full benefits package to their employees. Many others aspire to integrate these programs for their teams and work systematically to bring their employer profiles up to the level of the best nationwide. However, unfortunately, too many others see the costs and inconvenience of running such programs to help employees make such initiatives seem unnecessary or out of reach. Here is some information about the worst problems employees and business owners face as a consequence of insufficient job benefits for workers and what small businesses can do to alleviate those issues for their teams and boost their profits as a result.
Biggest Problems Faced by Pavement Sweeping Workers
First, think about the collective impact of the numerous serious difficulties for many workers. At least some of these are common in pavement sweeping companies and other businesses where not enough benefits are offered to provide a sustainable source of employment for people. For some examples:
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The list above is obviously too long for us to detail the consequences for employees in workplaces where some or all of these problems affect them daily. So, let’s take a closer look at just a few of these situations:
- Improper protective gear and safety training expose workers to higher injuries, respiratory impacts, and other health and safety risks.
- Having no retirement plan and too few other monetary benefits programs leaves employees working year in and year out with no financial safety net in case of unexpected job termination for any reason, or long-term illness, or for eventual retirement.
- Management that does not encourage or even permit honest feedback and ideas for process improvements to leadership is promoting frustration, distrust, and resentment among their workers. These lead to widespread lack of loyalty or caring about the company, which can devastate the all-important positive internal culture that sustains quality customer service and the willingness of workers to go the extra mile for the company as needed.
- Isolation for drivers and other employees working alone in a vehicle or office throughout their entire shift every workday (especially at night when there are few people even passing by) can have a strong negative impact. Being alone so much over months and years can lead to a sense of disconnectedness from the company, from management and coworkers, and from the rest of the world. Long-term loneliness can cause extreme stress, depression, and a sense that no one cares about their accomplishments, their needs, their future, or their well-being.
- No skills and career development programs are provided for many workers. They do not have the benefit of a company-sponsored career advancement program that helps them assess their strengths and long-term goals, provide on-the-job and external training and education resources and sponsorship, track their progress, and find advancement opportunities for them. This can lead to a sense of directionlessness and hopelessness.
- Nonresponsive management that ignores employees suggestions, complaints, requests, or even their friendly morning greeting promotes an environment in which the workers feel disrespected, unseen, disliked, under-valued, degraded, and even dehumanized. This develops a workplace of disgruntled workers who are less likely to think or act as a team, to support each other or management, or even to contribute willingly to the company’s best interests while they’re on the job.
Benefits for the Best Pavement Sweeping Companies from Offering Workers More
Of course, most employers we’ve met in the industry do offer at least some of the worker programs above to enhance worker experience and security and promote a positive work environment. Below are some great examples of what some of the best companies are doing.
They understand the cost of turnover when you lose a good employee. They know you lose productivity. You lose revenues from accounts you cannot service. You lose sleep from doing double duty to cover the workload of the lost employee. You lose money and time spent for advertising to find a replacement. The quality of your work is compromised, and your reputation with it. You lose uptime during onboarding and training and must struggle to keep up with commitments.
The best employers know that by retaining good workers longer, you can save yourself from the difficulties listed above. Your turnover cost (the most dreaded of all costs in any business) is slashed. Your productivity increases. Your revenues are stabilized. You can get enough rest to function well. You can avoid employer ads and other recruiting costs, preserve performance quality, and avoid downtime for onboarding and training. You can not only keep your current customer commitments, you can spend the time you would have spent struggling to catch up due to turnover on planning growth and taking the steps to achieve it.
Weighing these factors in the decision to offer workers more, it begins to make a lot of sense to do what it takes to upgrade the employment package for your team. The best employers recognize that improving the quantity and quality of work your company can provide for customers, and what that can mean for your local brand reputation, growth, and long-term profitability certainly justifies the cost of making life better for your employees in any way possible.
This leads to one of the two key points we offer in this article: You don’t have to provide all or nothing at all for your workers. It can be easy to imagine that if you give them less than everything then what you do will always seem deficient to them. But, test that notion by simply putting yourself in your workers’ shoes for a moment. Would you rather have a little raise, or no raise? An annual performance review and small bonus, or no feedback and no bonus? A break area with free coffee and bottled water, or nothing? These may seem like insignificant changes, but even one is a notable improvement for a worker who does not have it to enjoy.
So, if you cannot afford to provide health insurance, a 401K retirement plan with even a minimal employer match, life insurance, educational sponsorship, or other popular major benefits, then start with things you can do to improve the employee experience for your staff.
To Bring Your Driver Policies Up to the Standards of the Industry’s Best Companies
Even the most modest sweeping company can do the right thing for your team, while still doing the right thing for your business, your family, and yourself. To start cultivating an environment where workers can thrive for smaller business owners who aspire to integrate these programs for their teams, consider these small steps:
- Aggressively seek out new customers. Yes, that may mean you’ll need another route, which means you’ll need another truck, which means another big expense. Consider dialing back your determination to buy only new equipment and opt to start with good used alternatives. Leverage your loan costs against your increased revenues from the additional accounts.
- Calculate your cost of delivering services to each account and price accordingly. Do not undercut your own threshold of profitability trying to grab accounts from competitors. It’s a long-proven self-defeating strategy. That’s because, if you can’t make a profit, you can’t keep operating. It means you’re paying to work instead of being paid. If you’re being paid enough to profit, you can better afford to share some of your business’s income with employees by adding a relevant program or two to make your business a more appealing place to work.
Perspective on Driver Policy Improvements
You may read the list of problems above and still think the road to paying for substantial improvement in worker benefits looks too long and rough for your small business. Goals of operating among the best places in your market for people to work and thrive, vs. just coping every day, can seem far out of reach. However, as you’ve seen above, there are ways to make significant improvements in working conditions for your employees without breaking the bank.
Small sweeping businesses that offer zero incentives or even basic safety-net programs for workers tend to struggle more, stagnate, and even fail. On their way down they may eventually become even more fearful of spending anything at all to meet the basic needs of employees, perhaps feeling increasingly desperate and urgently slashing worker-related expenses at any cost to revenue generation.
And that’s the second of the two major points of this article: Pushing payroll-related budget minimization to the tipping point, even cutting work hours so low that good customers are forfeited to poor service is the wrong choice, vs. rightly cutting away unprofitable accounts, buying good used instead of brand new equipment, and finding other places to cut that don’t directly impact your service capacity and quality.
To succeed and sustain your success long-term and enjoy your own work life more as a business owner in your chosen industry, look back at your entrepreneurial errors around managing the needs of the employees that work for you. That means recognizing the larger, overarching point here: As it turns out, for all the reasons we’ve discussed above, you really cannot afford not to invest in the well-being of the people who they must rely on to make their business succeed.