Do I Owe My Employees a Career Path?

Paul Downs wrote about being the boss of a small business in a New York Times blog:

As sales pick up, I’ve been trying to build our production capacity proportionally. This has been hard for me to accomplish in the past. During the last big expansion, between 2003 and 2008, I found myself in the position of hiring willy-nilly, throwing warm bodies at production bottlenecks. In the rush to get work out the door, we never set up a training program and we didn’t do a good job of increasing productivity with technology. This was a disastrous mistake. More than anything else, an inflated payroll drained cash from the company and kept us from making a profit.

As we ramp up again, I’m doing it differently. It’s become apparent to me over the years that the key to a highly productive work force is training and specialization. On the shop floor, that means that the guys are doing a narrower range of things. We don’t make all kinds of furniture any more — now it’s conference tables and more conference tables, with a credenza or two thrown in.

And the work is being segmented further: we have one guy who does bases, three who do tops, and a foreman who runs the CNC milling machine and coordinates everyone else. The finisher applies all the finishes, and there is a guy who maintains machines, keeps the place clean, packs finished pieces on pallets, and runs the shipping operation. In the office there is one engineer, one salesman and me.

This is a big change from the early years, when each worker did a wide variety of things. (As recently as 2002, I was designing, selling, finishing, bookkeeping, doing all the deliveries, and cleaning the bathrooms.) That made for an interesting job, but it wasn’t efficient enough to support living wages and benefits. We’ve been doing much better by narrowing the responsibilities of each worker. They are getting to be very, very good at what they are doing, and the increased productivity has led (at long last) to positive cash flow.

So what’s the problem? Career paths. My employees want to advance. They’ve been raised to expect more challenges, more responsibility, more money. Which is great, except that their positions aren’t necessarily steps to some greater goal. They’re just jobs that need to be done. My company isn’t large enough to have some defined pathway from apprentice to senior manager.

Being responsible for your workers’ jobs is hard. Being responsible for their careers is harder. It seems to be the fashion to let your workers take responsibility for their own careers. But that assumes a lot of bouncing from job to job, each one better than the last. My people stay with me for a long time – my longest serving employee is in his 18th year, and I have two more with more than 12 years. Five more have been with me more than five years. When people have been around that long, they expect a progression to their job: more pay, more responsibility, more everything.

Losing people is a disaster for me. We operate in a little backwater of the economy, and there’s a limited supply of skilled woodworkers. With the elimination of shop classes all over the country, the pipeline is not being refilled. Hiring and training are an expensive crap shoot. On the whole, I’m glad that my people stick around. I like to believe that it’s a positive reflection on my qualities as a boss.

So here’s the question: Do I have a responsibility to try to expand the scope of our activities so that my people have more opportunities to advance? Or is that an unreasonable expectation for a boss?