…your heart makes, when you’re fast asleep.
Have faith in your dreams and someday
Your rainbow will come smiling through.

That’s what Cindarella tells us to do, right?

There’s a book titled The Dream Manager. A a friend of mine asked me to read over one weekend and get back to him with my thoughts. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s about a company who suffered from extremely high turnover rates of employees (400%), not to mention most employees only stayed on for around three months. In an attempt to reduce their turnover, they decided to do send out a survey to employees with one question – “Why do you think people leave our company?”

The top answer wasn’t what you thought it was. Money, right? That did make the list, but it wasn’t a top item.

Transportation!

This was a janitorial company, and many of the workers didn’t have transportation to get to and from the buildings they cleaned. Most shifts were in the evenings, so public transportation was out. You know what the managers of the company did? They started providing a shuttle to get people two and from work. Pretty awesome, right! This helped matters right away.

They continued to work down the list and have further conversations about how best to serve their employees. Another survey was sent out with another question – “What are your dreams?”

Long story short, they decided as a company to help their employees achieve certain dreams and hired a Dream Manager, someone who would help employees reach certain goals and dreams within a six month time frame. They ranged from home ownership to taking a vacation. After a period of time, turnover went from 400% to 224%. If you know anything about the janitorial business, this is a HUGE improvement, but the best part of this story is, they made their employees feel valued, understood and even heard.

We all need people in our court to help us achieve our dreams, whether that be someone at work, a family member or a friend.

Does the company you keep crush your dreams, or do they encourage you to follow them?

If you don’t have a person, maybe I can be your dream manager!

Until next time,