The Thorny Issue of Legacy Employees
If your construction company has been around for a while, you have legacy employees who helped you grow your business but, being brutally honest, don’t contribute to your efforts as much today. You may even have employees who can’t keep up with all the changes you’ve made and are even holding you back. What do you do about this tricky and emotionally volatile issue?
Please tune in this week as Wayne defines what a legacy employee is, gives you four questions to assess whether a legacy employee still fits, and offers several ways you can tap into legacy employee’s gifts and experience to further improve your company. Please let us know in the comments section what works for you in assessing legacy employees and repurposing them for the modern construction world.
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Hi, this is Wayne Rivers at FBI, and We Build Better Contractors.
This week, I want to talk about the thorny issue of legacy employees. We'll define that term in a minute. Our members
are growing. Their volume is growing. Their employee engagement is growing, their IT capacities. They're just growing in
so many different ways. And growth presents challenges. So, what about this is important to you? Well, we all have legacy
employees. Any of us that have been around for a while do. And my observation, both with me at FBI and with so many
of our members is that we wait too long to take necessary actions with legacy employees. This idea for a blog came from
an article in the CEO Network, which is a very worthwhile daily newsletter that you can take online.
So, let's define legacy employees, okay? Legacy employees were once key team members, they helped you get where you
are now, and they have a long tenure with you. So those three things mean that there's a lot of emotional connection
subject to the legacy employees. And it makes it harder to make decisions when you're embroiled in emotion, doesn't it?
So, what I'm going to suggest with legacy employees is do what Steven Covey says and begin with the end in mind. The
first thing is look at your strategic plan. What? You don't have one? You've got to have one. Dennis and I preach about this
all the time. It's probably the most important tool that you can have for long run success as a contractor. But look at your
plan and think about where you're going according to plan. And then ask four questions with respect to your legacy
employees.
Number one, does this person have the skills and energy necessary to help us get to the next level? Number two, what if
I had an entire team like this legacy employee? What would that do for me? Or what would that prevent me from doing?
Number three, what if this person walked in tomorrow and quit? 12 months from now, would I be better off or worse off?
And for the acid test question, would you enthusiastically rehire this person today in his or her current role? That is the
most important of the four questions.
And you think about that. You think about, oh, today I'm a hundred-million-dollar heavy civil contractor, but in five years,
our ambition is to be a $200 million contractor. Well, running a company that's twice as big as the company you currently
run requires different skills, different talents, all kinds of different things. And if you can't say, "I would enthusiastically
rehire that person right now today, as I look out over the next five years," then that really is a point that you have to
reckon with.
So now if your legacy employee, as you analyze these four questions, doesn't really fit in your future. That doesn't mean
you have to fire them. That doesn't mean they have to become persona non grata. They could teach and mentor young
people. They can provide a ton of value and knowledge transfer from them to the people that are going to succeed them
in their jobs. And they can help onboard new people because they're familiar with the culture and all those kinds of things.
So, all of that history and knowledge and experience that they have is really valuable, but you may need to tap into it in a
way different from what they're doing today and have them adjust their roles.
So, we'd like to know, in the comments, what tools and tactics have you used to successfully retrain your legacy employees
so that they add value versus holding you back from achieving the goals that you want to in your future. This is Wayne
Rivers at FBI, and We Build Better Contractors.
