Caring About Your Employees Is a Business Advantage, Not a Soft Skill

You care about your people more than they know. That gap between how much you care and how little they see it is costing you A players, and your competitors are filling it with bigger paychecks.

I've spent years sitting across the table from trade contractors. Commercial, service, residential, it doesn't matter. Within the first 20 minutes of a candid conversation, owners tell me things they've never told anyone else. They lose sleep over a guy who got hurt on the job. They get sick to their stomach when a paycheck gets messed up. They carry someone's family crisis around in their head all weekend.

And their people have no idea.

Owners in the trades care deeply and hide it completely

I don't think you go into this industry unless you care about people. Your business is about people. You build cool stuff, sure. But the whole thing runs on human beings showing up and giving a damn.

So why does nobody know? Because caring comes across as soft in the trades. Weak. So when we do say something, it comes out awkward. It comes out weird. Sometimes it comes out as frustration, because we don't have the words.

Instead we say things like "I wish they'd leave their home life at the door." "Don't bring the drama to work, we don't have time for that." Transportation issues, health issues, addiction issues, family problems. Sorry, not my department. That's what our people hear. And then we wonder why they don't feel connected to us.

I heard a guy speak once who grew up in the trades. He asked the room: when's the last time you told one of your guys how you really felt? For him, it's three words. I love you. When's the last time you said anything close to that to someone on your crew? When's the last time you let them know you care about their personal success, their career, their health, their finances?

We don't. So we do weird things instead. We take them hunting. We hand out another Yeti cooler or a Traeger grill and call it appreciation. They don't need another cooler. They need to know you care.

Caring is not the opposite of high standards

Let me kill the objection before it forms. I'm not telling you to drop the standards and sing Kumbaya all day.

The owners I know with the highest standards and the lowest turnover are the exact same owners whose people know they matter. Those crews know precisely how the owner feels. They know leadership will put an arm around them and say "let's walk this together." And in the same breath, "we still have work to do."

We have performance metrics to hit. We have to be productive and profitable, because without profit there's no business left to put your arm around anybody in. Caring and accountability live in the same house. I wrote about that in Culture Is What Happens on a Tuesday, because culture isn't the speech, it's the behavior under pressure.

I say the word empathy and grown men roll their eyes at me. Fine. Roll them. But maybe if we got a little better at communicating how much we care, we wouldn't have half the problems we have in this industry. Maybe a generation of kids whose only validation came from likes by strangers looks at the trades and says, those are my people. They get me. That's not the work I want to do. That's the team I want to be on.

Loyalty gets built in somebody's worst week, not their best

I spent a full day with 20 service managers who all work for the same company. I told them what I heard in the way they talked about their leaders. Deep loyalty. Real loyalty. So I asked them where it came from and sent them to lunch to think about it.

Story after story came back the same. I was going through something hard. One had a spouse with a terminal diagnosis and six months left. And every story ended the same way: my boss came alongside me and said we're figuring this out together. How can I serve you right now?

Those people came out of the worst season of their lives carrying 400 tons on their back just to stay on that team. It's counterintuitive. It feels weird. Who has time for that when the business already has enough problems?

I'm telling you it's one of the biggest competitive advantages you have access to.

A bigger paycheck rents loyalty. It never buys it.

What are you actually competing for right now? There's more work than any of us can sign. The shortage is people. So we poach. We don't have time to train someone brand new, so we go find somebody with the skills and the experience already baked in.

And how do we win that fight? We write a bigger check.

Your A players don't pick an employer on price. They pick the same way your customers pick you. Your customers don't always take low bid. They don't trust low bid. Do these guys have the expertise? Why are they so cheap? Same instinct applies to a job offer.

Paying more doesn't earn trust. It feigns loyalty for a while. And I promise you somebody in your market will outspend you in a race to the bottom, because they're a crummy place to work and buying loyalty is their only play. I've said for years that signing bonuses and top-dollar offers are usually a bribe to keep people inside a culture they'd otherwise leave. That's not you. You care about your A players. You care about the new guy who isn't getting it right yet but shows up committed every single day. You care about the guy whose head isn't screwed on straight this week.

You're allowed to want your people to have fantastic lives. You're allowed to tell them you're excited about what they're chasing and you want in on it. I built the Growth Accelerator Program around exactly that idea. When you make caring visible and wire it into how you run the business, your competitors never get close. Most owners never see what's leaking out the back door while they look at the paycheck, and I unpacked that in Why Your Best Employee Quits Without Warning.

The Monday move

Tell one employee exactly what they did well this week and why it mattered to the business. One person. Not the personal stuff yet. Just the work.

The why is where we fail. "Good job" makes you sound weird. "Here's why it mattered. The customer called me after. Here's what they said. Thank you." Watch what that does.

Ready to find out where you're the bottleneck? Take the Bottleneck Test at corematters.com.

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