Happy employees build successful small businesses

Employee satisfaction is a business necessity when you need to fulfil your promise of good customer service. A business’s reputation and success grows when employees deliver quality service that attracts and retains customers. When small businesses such as the Tyre Hospital focus on employee satisfaction they master one of the keys to business success.

If you need a tyre repaired, the Tyre Hospital is the place to go if you’re in the Kirkwood area, a farming community 81km north of Gqeberha. Owner Susan du Toit will help get you and your car, bike, passenger vehicle and tractor back on the road or the farm. That is — Du Toit and her five employees who make this small business successful.

Du Toit and her husband started the Tyre Hospital in 2015 after being retrenched on the same day via email. 

“We started small and have grown the business over the past six years,” Du Toit says. This includes moving to new premises, complementing the Tyre Hospital with a motor spares business and a Cassie’s takeaway restaurant. 

Du Toit relies on her team to deliver good service to customers and knows employee satisfaction is important to achieving this.  

The link between happy employees and a successful business is well established. A happier workforce is clearly associated with a company’s ability to deliver better customer satisfaction — particularly in industries with the closest contact between workers and customers, according to a 2019 Harvard Business Review article that looked at several studies on the subject. 

Du Toit shares three tips to ensure employee satisfaction:

Make sure you have the right employees 

Du Toit starts an employee’s journey with a three-month probation. This gives the business and the potential employee time to make sure they can do the job and are happy in the job.

“If they are not happy during the probation period, or we are not happy, either party can give notice,” she says. At the end of the probation period, Du Toit offers successful candidates a contract.

Ensure your employees understand what they need to do and know how to do it 

“You need to have a lot of patience and understanding,” Du Toit says. “Know what education and experience an employee has.” This will help identify areas for further training and explanation, and ensure employees aren’t given work they don’t have the skills to complete.  

Be flexible 

Du Toit’s approach to staff is flexible and supportive — one of the main traits all successful small business owners embrace. 

“Though it can be disruptive, when an employee has a sick child they need to take time off to be with their family. You can’t foresee these things, but you have to understand that they happen, and you have to work around them,” she says.

Spending time on employee satisfaction, and dealing with customers, reduces the amount of time available for admin and accounting.  

Du Toit uses Sage Cloud solutions for her banking, bookkeeping and accounting needs. Using Sage Business Cloud Accounting can reduce time spent on admin by up to 80%. 

Not only does the Tyre Hospital benefit from this time-saving, the cloud-based solutions mean Du Toit can work from anywhere, critical for a small-business owner.

Sage’s solutions also make it easier for her auditor to complete tax returns. 

“I can give my auditor permission to log on to my profile and she can pull the reports she needs to complete our VAT returns,” Du Toit says.

Ultimately, this is a money saver as the information is already available — reducing admin and hours taken to complete returns. 

This article was paid for by Sage.