5 Ways to Give More to Employees | CEO Ninja Style

As CEO, if you haven’t had a study conducted to determine what it would take for your employees to lead a safe and prosperous life, then you don’t have a clear picture of your company’s holistic success.

We could have said as a ‘manager’ as well as CEO. And the study doesn’t have to be an arduous extravaganza of data spanning years and then presented by an outside consultant, delaying any changes while still gaining from the optic that you’re tackling employee culture as the real creativity comes through strategically capitalizing research costs. That is one approach, and it is almost the Ninja way, but not completely.

Under what circumstances would you yourself take the front lines job at your company? Activate: imagination. Or put on your new VR Meta Oculus goggles.

If your schedule was going to be 7am to 5pm, with a required one hour break, or 11am to 9pm, and you would be on your feet all day with data to enter and challenges out of your control to balance, with customers walking out all day because of price, availability or simply their own preference, thereby deciding your level of successful performance, and you earned 2500 per month… what must have been the difference in your raising, your upbringing, and background circumstances to where this job was a course of action you would willfully take?

A difference in how you learned to organize finances perhaps? If you can make the 2500 per month be a smart play for you, what type of living situation and budget choices would allow that 2500 to satisfy your personal requirements for an occupational choice? Knowing you, you would be taking this job as a smart decision, so you must have already procured housing that fit within that budget. In order to clear funds for food, utilities, insurance, transportation and other bills, you probably would have a housing situation of no more than 1000 per month established. Then, the balance of $1500 would be wisely enough to cover your car, gas, clothes, groceries, health, travel, and leisure, with enough to aim some towards the safety net of your savings.

You’re on the front lines in this hypothetical experiment, so it is very important that you have created a realistic life situation in which it was a strong decision for you to have completed that application, proven to the hiring manager that you should be trusted and hired, and have accepted an offer. Your significant life influences, if you have them in this dream scenario, support this step.

Fully calculated as you always are, your housing, car, bills, expenses, and total budget point to this as your best play. This 'study' will allow you to see if you’re in synch with what the best play is for your employees. It will allow you to see if your hiring team is in line with this clear picture of what these jobs represent.

Is it a full life for many years of $2500/month, increasing 3% after each year?

The only answer here is growth. You would not work for yourself for the wage, but you may for the development. Create the organization such that that an associate working for you two years will result in them being more valuable than your company can afford to pay them. This is the only transparent, honest win-win. If you would not, could not live on their salary, then for your own health and responsibility - distance yourself from the decrying of integrity, respect, and honesty in your mission language, unless you are earnestly developing honest advantages to accepting work for you.

That is the Ninja way. When I get someone earning half what I earn, for doing things I wouldn’t, it is my goal to help them do those things so easily, and with such a vision, that they will surely have better opportunities before long. So I focus on development, which doesn’t necessarily demand more in the work, but can present a change to default and habitual perspectives. That is the value we can give, when our budget falls short.

I have had staff members, because of an understandable attitude of indifference, resist - and had to replace them after I tried. In one case, learning later that someone I let go seemingly became a different person, and advanced in duties and rank shortly after. But I will neither pretend our organization treats lower-wage roles as we do our VIPs, nor will I revel in the benefits of the labor made available to me by someone’s unfortunate life circumstances which made this job their ‘best play’ simply because it was their only play. The Ninja way looks for the win-win. It takes effort, but it is effort that customers and employees will reflect. And it allows us to sit right with ourselves.

5 Ideas For a Company to Offer Value Beyond Wages

-Financial Mentorship

-Wellness Coaching

-Management Training

-Counseling

-Perks

Tips and Considerations

It is an undertaking to conceptualize, package neatly, and implement new initiatives. For that reason they might be rolled out as the stages in which they genuinely exist, which could help to team-source and fuel the progress towards the next steps. You may have an HR associate passionate in one of these areas, or a manager who has experience and ideas valuable for the development, or even volunteers.

The real benefit of these developmental initiatives would be the point at which they become a consensus, conscious part of how the people throughout the organization view their company's personality - the moment when you can feel the throughline of these values, and people are proud they can so easily explain something that sounds like Urdu to contemporaries with tunnel vision Pavlovianly engineered for metrics: working here places you in the environment of consistent and practical support to develop in not only work, but life and personal fulfillment.

Development is a real life, universal dimension that some 'culture' efforts disregard or under-address.

But We Like Our Emails About Holiday Trees and Coriander Potstickers

No you don’t. And further, if redefining in this way takes corporate-culture bandwidth from honoring the nuances of how traditions from the far western north-east celebrate the equinox, then be proud and excited to stand behind a shift towards a culture of supportive personal flourishing as more of a focus than repeated attempts as a sociology light-bearer.

Continue to embrace and include every culture. A Ninja always will. But the close-knit family that joins hands to clog dance around a bowl of parsnip broth on the 7th of the month doesn’t so much need HR’s pat on the back. We’re talking here about the uninsured motorist who is on their way to greet 85 of your customers today, maintain your $4M asset, and the manager who will soon be interviewing their replacement.

-Ethan Sharrett

notjustninjas.com