When Key Employees Leave

Very few businesses can claim to be prepared for the loss of key employees. Quite often it is an unexpected and unplanned and an event that causes quite a bit of disruption to “business as usual”.

It is quite a gut-wrenching experience to see an employee you have worked with over a period of time leaving your business. Even if the parting of ways is on good terms with a period of handover, you just know that there is so much information walking out the door with your former employee and there is nothing you can do about it.

And this is only just the beginning…

While laboring through a period of being understaffed and overworked, you are then faced with the task of recruiting a new employee to fill the vacant position. This is followed by the inevitable probation and training period where, hopefully the new employee comes up to speed and is able to pick up where the former employee left off.

The problem is: What exactly was it that the former employee really did? They always seemed to be busy and on the rare occasion that they were absent due to illness, there were those problems that arose that were only truly resolved when they returned and took control and “cleaned things up”.

There has to be a better way…

Fortunately quite a bit can be done to minimize the impact of situations like this on our business. And like most truly worthwhile solutions the steps required to complete this part of your business development does take some effort on your part.

There is an established path that you can follow to get your business in order and the benefits to you and your employees are much farther reaching than just minimizing the impact of key employees leaving you.

The following is by no means a definitive list of what is required. But it does give you some idea of the steps required.

1) Create a flexible forward thinking Organization Chart defining the positions you require in your business.

2) Determine what the responsibilities are for the positions in your business.

3) Assign Employees to relevent positions in the Business.

4) Document key information that is critical to your business and make it available to your employees.

5) Work with your employees to define what it is they do, how they do it and most importantly how it could be done better.

6) Record, optimize then implement the business systems you have identified.

7) Assign the business systems to the relevant positions and monitor their use.

By consistently following these steps for all positions in your business you will insulate yourself from some of the problems that occur when key employees leave your business.

Praise Matters

Some common concerns for any business are:

How do we increase productivity?

How do we improve customer service?

How do we keep people actively engaged in their work and with others on their team?

How do we reduce turnover?

How do we improve safety?

Even if you aren’t thinking about or concerned about every one of those questions, I’m sure at least one of them has kept your attention in the past.

As leaders we think about these things because they impact the success of the organization. As coaches we think about how to impact these things day-to-day, person-by-person.

As a coach, someone helping people improve their performance for the benefit of both the individual and the organization, there are typically two types of feedback that you could provide on their performance at any time. Constructive feedback (sometimes called criticism) and positive feedback (which I will call praise).

Forgetting the words for a minute, these two types of information are important to anyone trying to do anything better. We need to know what we aren’t doing quite right, so we can adjust, and we need to know what we are doing well, so we can replicate that. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

If you are like many I’ve discussed this with, you have received more negative, “constructive” feedback than positive, encouraging feedback at work. And you believe that with more encouragement or praise you might have been more successful quicker.

The point in two words?

Praise matters.

And it is vastly underused as a coaching tool by most people most of the time.

As you finish reading this and walk away from your desk and begin interacting with people (whether you coach them or not), keep these things in mind:

· Praise gives us pride in our jobs. Given a choice, would you rather have people who take pride in their work, or not?

· Praise generates enthusiasm and commitment. Committed people can work miracles, so it pays to build commitment.

· Praise builds loyalty. What are the real and hidden costs of employee turnover?

· Praise prevents people from feeling taken for granted. When people feel taken for granted they are less committed and loyal, aren’t they?

· Praise motivates us to “go the extra mile.” The extra mile is often where we find satisfied customers, higher returns and more.

· Praise improves our relationships. Would you like to have better relationships with those you lead, coach and work with?

· Praise takes hardly any time and costs nothing. There are few things in life that can produce such great returns for such a small investment.

Get that praise tool out of your toolbox. It is an easy tool to use. It is a fun tool to use.

If the questions at the beginning of this article were familiar, start with praise, because praise matters.

Workforce Management Policies to Keep Skilled People

You might be able to attract people with high value skills through a well-presented ad. However, to keep them with you, your organization must have put in place workforce management policies that make these people want to continue with the organization.

The policies must fit in with the organization and the place where it is located. If the policies are incompatible with the existing organization and place, they are likely to remain just book policies that will not be implemented in their true spirit.

Let’s look at some standard workforce management policies that can create an environment that makes people want to remain with you.

Induction Training: Help new employees to quickly become a productive member of your team through an effective induction process. Introduce them to other team members and help them absorb your organizational culture, and to become familiar with the ways of working in your organization.

Clear Goals and Roles: Develop job descriptions that indicate clearly what team role each employee should seek to play, and what goals the person should seek to achieve.

Goals Aligned to Higher Level Goals: Carefully align employee goals with the team goals, which are aligned with successively higher level goals culminating in overall company goals. That way, the employee would find it easy to contribute in a meaningful manner, and be rewarded accordingly.

Work Environment: Arrange workstations, facilities and tools that help employees perform without undue stress. Uncomfortable workstations, high noise levels, having to find needed tools yourself, and so on are stressful and make employees look for better places to work in.

Credible Performance Measurement and Reward Structure: One of the best motivating factors is being recognized and rewarded for good performance. The performance must be measured in a way that the employee can understand clearly. Good performance, which can also be measured in terms of contribution to team effectiveness, should be rewarded consistently and without discrimination.

Skills and Career Development Options: Each employee should be able to develop his or her skill, and a career development path should be open for his or her progress in the organization. A certification program can add to the attractiveness.

An Effective Mentoring Program: A mentoring program that helps each employee achieve personal and company objectives should supplement the above. The mentor would try to help the employee meet company expectations in a way that also meets personal expectations.

Carefully developed workforce management policies that fit in with the organization and the place where it is located could pay high dividends. Your organization will find it easier to attract the right kind of people, with the right skill set that you need. More importantly, you will find it possible to retain these skilled employees in your organization.

Without Workforce Planning, Your Organization Could Become Extinct

Workforce planning is a key workforce management step for long-term survival in a situation where workers are aging or leaving, and business environments are constantly changing.

You need to replace workers who leave. You also need to adapt to new business environments by getting people with needed skills.

Workforce Planning Goals

Existing workload determines current workforce levels. So the first step of workforce planning is to assess this workload, its skills set composition and location requirements. To assess this requirement, you answer the following questions:

• What kinds of skilled workers do you need to achieve your organizational purpose?
• How many persons with each kind of skill are needed to achieve targeted performance levels?
• Where would these persons be needed – geographically and departmentally?

Answering the above questions is only the starting point of workforce planning. A complete plan would also identify the strategies needed to get the people required to man your workforce, and to keep the people with you.

For the longer-term, you need to estimate:

• The number of workers who would retire or leave and have to be replaced
• Additional numbers of differently skilled persons who would have to be added to meet expansion needs
• Likely developments affecting your business and the likely changes in the number and composition of your workforce under the new environments

Workforce planning is a continuous process that needs to be updated as the requirements and forecasts change.

Implementing the Workforce Planning Process

The key requirement for successful workforce planning is to get your managers to understand the significance and importance of planning. Without their active involvement, you cannot expect to develop realistic plans that are affected by diverse factors.

Create a workforce planning team consisting of employees from different departments, with required knowledge and interests. Define the team’s role and responsibilities.

Use modern software tools and planning systems to speed up the processes of data collection, analysis and generating preliminary plans. These can then be human-reviewed for fine-tuning.

Start carefully with a smaller scope, review the processes, get feedback and improve the effectiveness of workforce planning exercise.

Workforce Recruitment and Development Strategies

Workforce planning is not just an exercise with numbers, though numbers are important. You have to look at the labor market and competitive conditions, and develop strategies to attract and retain the kind of workforce you need.

Think through the policies and practices you need to attract and retain talented people. Build your brand as a good place to work in. Create working conditions and a managerial culture that would make your people want to remain with you.

Spell these out and include them in your workforce plan.

For organizations to survive in the long term, they must be able to attract and keep the right kind of talented people. Workforce planning helps you to assess your people needs, in both skill sets and numbers, and start developing and implementing strategies and policies to attract, develop and keep the kind of workforce you need.

Why Teambuilding is Vital to Your Success

Great teamwork is one of the most important keys to your company’s success. The more harmoniously people work together, the better it is for your company. Teamwork is the way that things get done these days – and if you don’t have a cohesive team, you’re seriously handicapping your company out in the marketplace. According to Wikipedia, team building is necessary for success because it’s unnatural for people to come together in a new group and immediately begin to get along. Throughout history, building a team has been the function of shared experiences and history. When that experience and history is lacking, it’s difficult for a group to share a common vision and goal, or to function together in a way that promotes the best qualities of each team participant. In other words – to function as a team.

Getting your employees to stop thinking of each other as competitors and start working as a team isn’t quite as easy as it sounds, but it is vital if you want to be a powerful force in your business. Among the advantages of team building are the following:

1. Teams are more successful in implementing complex plans and strategies. Because you can split the work into responsibility areas, a team can tackle more complex projects more efficiently than a group of individuals.

2. Teams come up with more creative solutions because they can network and brainstorm. When team members bounce ideas off of each other, they arrive at solutions that none would have evolved alone. As teams continue to work together, many of them find that their individual work benefits from their new ability to see things from other perspectives.

3. Teams build commitment to ideas and plans because they have ownership of the idea. When a team is involved in a project from the start, they are more likely to be committed to the ideals it represents.

4. Teams are more enduring than reliance on individuals. If you have one person who is responsible for a project, the loss of that person can cripple the project. When you rely on a team, the loss of one individual may be difficult, but the work of the team will continue.

5. Team building activities motivate your employees to deliver their very best effort on behalf of the team.

What do you think?  Are teams important in your company?