The message of our P4 research is abundantly clear.
Advisory firms that prepare their employees to succeed, tie employee compensation to the success of the firm, create a flexible and supportive work environment, and supply the tools for employees to excel at their jobs, create great employees.
What are P4 Cultures?
Herbers & Company conducted a four-year long employee performance study. The results of the study were called “P4 Cultures: The key elements to building great businesses by creating great employees.”
What we learned in the study was that most all the difficult employees worked for the same firms and some of those firms even had a history of problem employees. On the other hand, there were firms who rarely, if ever, had any problem employees. Through the study, what we discovered were striking differences in the way the two groups approached employee programs.
The successful firms, with rare employee performance issues, all designed and implemented employee programs in the same way, with four key elements all working cohesively together in one system. We’ve come to call this the P4 Principles: Preparation, Pay, Perks, and Productivity.
Each of these firms offered their employees all four key elements within their culture, designed in the same way, with the same mentality – a work environment that translated into a culture, setting themselves and their employees up for success (preparation); thoughtfully designed compensation packages and incentive structures (pay); benefits that provided motivation to their employees (perks); and tools and training designed to help them succeed (productivity).
The good news for small business owners and independent advisory firms is that these elements are not overly complicated, difficult to integrate into a business, or very expensive—especially when compared to the high costs of hiring star employees, chronic employee turnover, low employee productivity, unhappy employees, and usually hiring one consultant after another to “solve” these problems. In fact, the increased success of P4 firms far exceeds any additional costs of implementing these important principles in any company.
Training and tools to build P4 Cultures
Learn how to implement the P4 Principles at Herbers & Company Academy.
Want to know more data and research on P4 Cultures?