Young Employees' Sense of Entitlement

I enjoyed reading your post, and, hands down, completely agree with you. I agree that the youngsters these days do have a 'you owe me' attitude and seem to feel like world owed them something. I with you. It is our responsibility as business owners to be prepared and aware of the realities we will have to face. This issue is just such a reality we want to address but probably could conceive of an ethical way of how to deal with it. Will this post is it. Don't pass up such good information...read it. Thands for sharing the knowledge.

In working with a client, we followed the protocol as I suggested in my post. And now the time is here to review the employee's progress on their action plan. Stay tuned for an update on how it worked (or didn't) and how the employee's expectations changed (or didn't).

When I was a brand new pizza store manager I was greeted with insubordination on my first day. I asked the tallest employee to dust above a wall clock where I had noticed flour accumulating. This was absolutely within his job description. As the evening went I, I repeated the instruction a couple more times ... each time in front of witnesses. When we were about to close up I asked him why he hadn't done it. He said he couldn't reach it. This was patently false, but I let the lie slide. The next morning I brought a sturdy step-ladder in for him to use. This time, looking for a confrontation, he said he didn't want to do it. I calmly made it a direct order because I sensed that he was trying to intimidate me with his size. Then I went home, leaving the assistant manager to run the store. I wasn't scheduled to be present then, but I felt like I needed to follow through on this matter. On arrival the following morning, I noticed that he still had not complied. Looking over the logs I noted that we had been overstaffed for most of the evening, even though we had taken 'a late' on a 3-pie hour. Obviously he had had plenty of time to do the work and that ladder had taken away his excuse. So I prepared his termination papers and, when he showed up for work a half an hour later (and about 15 minutes late), called him into my cubby hole of an office, remained seated and defenseless, left him standing (absolutely the wrong staging had I been intimidated) and fired him on the spot. It was my third day as manager. Ever. His sister quit the following day. At the time, the store was already short-staffed and that particular job description was now vacant. Normally I would not fire someone unless I already had their replacement trained to fill the slot without interruption ... but this dismissal couldn't wait. The 6 remaining members of the crew stepped up to bat and we never missed a beat. Later, one by one and privately, they came and thanked me for standing up to this bully. They said that the former managers had fired him a couple times, but always brought him back -- and they asked me not to. That was never my intention ... I don't fire the same man twice. By Monday, I had filled both those vacancies and added two more. They blamed his attitude for keeping sales (and their earnings) down. They thought he was stealing from their tip boxes. Later, I asked an experience driver about this and he reported that the thefts had stopped. I've got to believe that. The day I walked into the store, we were two weeks from the end of that accounting period. There were 8 employees, myself and the poorest assistant manager I've ever seen. Over the course of the next full accounting period of 4 weeks, we earned the 2nd highest product & service award the company had to offer ... even though a new driver shanked it at the door with one of the mystery customers.* We also we quadrupled the staff ... with everyone trained to at least two positions. I was losing one young man to the Marines but our store was hitting record sales at the same time that all the surrounding stores were taking a dip of 4-7%. We beat the grand-opening sales ... and that's saying something. The take-away? Don't be afraid to fire people who have earned it. Don't be afraid to reward those who earn it, too. Use the stick AND the carrot. Reward competence (only) and that is what your people will give you. My drivers were making money, the store was making money, the CSR's were getting all the hours they wanted, plus a little. Pretty much everybody was happy except that assistant manager ... who I refused to promote until she learned her job well enough to warrant the expense of sending her, on full salary charged to the store, to pizza college. Manage. *He dishonored a (falsely) claimed late delivery. Company policy is to honor all falsely claimed lates (there is still profit in the pizza and there is NO profit in losing the customer entirely ... customer acquisition costs being what they are) and to volunteer all genuine late deliveries rather than wait for the customer to request that the delivery guarantee be honored. In this way, a poor delivery is actually a way to "WOW" the customer. ALWAYS go for the "wow!".