C Shaffstall

It has taken me many years to understand that you cannot teach work ethic. Oh sure, you can be a mentor and a moral guide, but in the end, I believe that people are either ethical by nature or they are not.

As a small business owner for the past three decades, I have outlined dozens of policies for the benefit of my staff. Every year I am forced to modify our vacation and personal-time-off policies in order to prevent isolated abuse. I have tried to be generous in ways that corporations cannot. I have tried to be accommodating in ways that consider the needs of a single employee as opposed to a global approach that is necessary when you have a large staff. I have provided benefits that were personal and with great consideration for the individual’s family, education, and private needs. My company has gifted wedding photos, baby sitters, a sliding-glass door, shopping sprees, pawn money, a car heater, and parties.

On one hand, this is exactly what I enjoy most about being an entrepreneur. Our companies are small and nimble and we are close enough to our staff to really see and feel their needs. We can turn a project on a dime and make a profit where a larger company could not. We are innovators, creators, and leaders, but we are also exposed. That’s the other hand.

An unethical employee can have a very real and extremely negative impact. We are in a position to take things personally, and to make sweeping changes to prevent future exposure when we’ve been wronged (like me changing the holiday benefits every year).

I’m starting to realize that I will likely never develop the perfect holiday policy. With each new employee, a new loophole is found, but I am becoming more resilient about whether or not I should let that loophole affect my big picture.

Believe me, I am not saying that you should overlook an unethical employee’s behavior — I lose sleep at night when I learn that an employee is cheating on their time card. What I’m trying to determine for myself is whether or not my personal work ethics are actually the high bar or whether it’s simply one’s point of view. Where I see coming to work late by 15 to 30 minutes every day as cheating, the chastised employees have looked at me with genuine disbelief that I would consider such an infraction as dishonest; or as a sign of unethical behavior.

Entrepreneurs work long and hard. Our companies often get more attention that our children. Losing 30 minutes of productivity a day (multiplied by the number of offenders) is often considered a personal affront — one that must be addressed in the strictest of terms. Unfortunately, it’s often a case of cutting off our nose to spite our face.

As a small company, losing a single employee — especially one with domain expertise — can range from difficult to detrimental to disasturous. Putting years of training into a key staff member only to have them leave due to repeated warnings over something as (some people would say) trivial as coming in late, can put a real burden on remaining empoloyess. It can also foster distrust between you and the rest of the employees if they side with the departing staff member.

I am not offering you any answers here. I have none. I’m still learning what the best path is for me and my companies. I’ve tried hiring people that share my entrepreneurial spirit, and they really are the perfect employee for me. Unfortuately 10 out of 10 times, when you hire an entrepreneur as an employee, they will leave you to go start their own venture.

[sigh]

So, while I lament here about my woes at keeping the good ones around and how to not feel screwed in the process, I continue to embark on new projects and add new people, and look for middle ground. I’m never going to just learn to live with it, it’s not in my nature to feel cheated and say nothing, but maybe I can learn that sometimes cheating is all in how you look at it.