Frankly Speaking Florally

Oh my.... Is it possible I'm taking the time to not only write a business blog today but I'm writing a blog about a topic that has to do with numbers? Wow, that's almost unheard of here at Monday Morning Flowers where the accounting is usually left up to Kevin and not me. The last few weeks had Kevin and I traveling up to New England for the East Coast Floral Expo and then back down to Washington, DC for the Society of American Florist volunteer meetings and in both weekends, we spent lots of quality time with other florists. At the NEFE we were able to sit in on quite a few wonderful business seminars and we always take away so much from those events. So, to the topic of this blog. About 3 years ago, we had a business consultant come into the operation to helps us with the "issues" we were having. Let's face it, it was during the recession and the environment at the shop was very stressful. I expressed a desire to understand what was going on with the

Over the past several months I’ve been reading a lot articles about various Employee Management and Review processes.   It’s quite common during this time of year because everyone is thinking of how to review their employees performance for the previous year and, if appropriate, how to reward them.   Over the past 30+ years I’ve worked for all types of Company’s, Large and Small, Public and Private, Product and Service based so I’ve been involved with various types of reviews.   Which type of review you use depends on a lot of variables including how large the staff is and your industry.   At our Company we’ve tried the written review process, noting strengths and areas for improvement, grading systems etc. but I think for a small company this is overkill and “worn out”.    I know the importance of documenting positive and negative behavior of an employee, and we have a separate system for that, but a few years ago we changed how we review job performance.   I like to call i