Tag: Talent managment

How to Help Your Staff Achieve a Positive Identity

As a successful manager, it is your responsibility to clarify, emphasize, and establish the corporate identity of your support staff. Understand that you may have to contend with a corporate culture that has historically under-valued support staff importance. This is, unfortunately, apparently a common condition. Along with improving operations, you may further strengthen your brand and enhance your career options by establishing a support staff identity. Here are some suggestions to achieve this goal.

Foster innovation. Administrative, marketing, sales, and customer service support staff can make valuable positive contributions to operations. Innovation can be a huge motivator and contributor. Support staff, working daily in the corporate “trenches,” often develops wonderful innovative ideas and valuable suggestions to improve operations. Encourage the sharing of these ideas and suggestions. Exceptional pearls of wisdom may come from this open communications policy.

Instill a secure identity. Reinforcing the importance of support staff contributions creates security in the identity and purpose of their functions. Security in the importance of their contribution encourages higher performance and a more positive workplace. Feeling the security and confidence of management lifts the spirits and production of support staff, particularly if feelings of insecurity or unimportance previously dominated the workplace. Feelings of security lead most employees to strive for further achievement—leading to further strengthened security.

Encourage collaboration. Little establishes someone’s credibility and sense of value more than invitations to collaborate to create ideas to help solve a problem, or generate improvements at the workplace. Encouraging support staff collaboration to contribute to operational improvement establishes their identity as a meaningful source of help. Increased feelings of valuable self-worth, confidence, and empowerment supply the identity that support employees often lack.

Publicly recognize achievements to establish a pride culture. “Criticize in private and praise in public,” always improves workplace conditions. Public recognition of support staff achievements by managers can create wonderful on-the-job results. You will be impressed, even amazed by the reaction to your simple “Thank you,” spoken publicly to a support employee. Public recognition of an individual or team typically affects other employees, who now recommit to improving their performance to compete for future public recognition.

5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Human Resources Management Skills

If you’re a small business owner, you may feel that Human Resources Management (HRM) only applies to large companies and corporations. But effective HRM provides strategies for managing employees in any size business. If your business hires employees on any level, HRM policies can help you improve every aspect of recruiting, safety, employee training, hiring and even firing. Gaining new skills in HRM can help you better deal with every aspect of your business’s human resources.

  • Let your employees work together, share ideas and develop a sense of ownership over their jobs and the workplace. When workers feel free to share ideas, it helps them to be more productive and more effective in their jobs. Give them the freedom to express their thoughts and utilize their creativity whenever you can.
  • Build relationships with your staff, colleagues and managers. This is done by expressing concern for others, treating people with respect, trusting them to want to do their jobs well, and giving them your full attention when required.
  • Create an environment that encourages your employees to perform better and recognizes their efforts when they do. It’s easy to overlook a job well done, simply because it’s expected that employees perform adequately. But if you have an employee who has been struggling to improve and she finally makes noticeable progress, let he/her know you noticed. It can help him/her to improve even more just to know you’re aware of him/her efforts.
  • Learn to communicate clearly, whether in writing or verbally. Communication skills can be learned. In fact, if you struggle in this area, take a few eCourses to help you improve your skills. This is one of the most important things you can do to improve your HRM abilities.
  • Lead your team by example rather than simply direction. This will help your employees respect you much more because they can see you’re not asking them to perform tasks you’re unwilling to perform.

Recognize what works and what doesn’t work in your HRM and eliminate ineffective procedures. Develop systems for monitoring success and learn to adapt your policies as needed to ensure your business is running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

What You Should Do Before Your Staff Members Go On Vacation

When a member of your team goes away for a few days, who will handle that person’s job duties? It is important to identify which pieces of their jobs need to be covered when your staff members take leave for any reason. Choose other employees on your team who can best cover certain parts of their coworkers’ jobs and have them train on those early on. Always have a back-up person for the pertinent processes in your office in case someone needs to take some time away.

Another important question to ask is whether or not your team member can complete parts of his or her job before leaving the office for a vacation. If there is a project you know will come up while that person is away, ask them to put in a little extra time and hard work before going away. This will ensure important reports, projects, or any other time-sensitive parts of their jobs will be performed before employees take time off. It will also likely make their first days back in the office a little easier because they’re not playing as much catch-up.

Finally, how can you mitigate the amount of vacation time an employee will need to spend being plugged in? With important projects out of the way beforehand and other employees available to fill in for vacationing team members, it all seems done, right? Not quite. It’s important to also consider questions from other colleagues and outside entities directed toward your vacationing staff member. Always make sure your employees set their out-of-office emails and voicemails to direct inquiring parties to the next available person.

While these steps for preparing for your staff member vacations seem like no-brainers, it takes careful strategy from you as a manager, as well as well-defined expectations from your team. Talk with them individually about their commitments and other skills to find out what they can help with while their coworkers take time away. Explain that their extra dedication will ensure more relaxation when they also take vacations from work. Have them document their job duties and general tips for coworkers who may fill in for them.

With a well-designed leave preparation plan, your employees can take much-needed vacation time while still providing the support you need for your team. They will also be willing to put in the extra time and effort leading up to their days off when they understand that this will allow them more freedom to turn off their phones and spend quality relaxing time away from the office.

Temp Agencies Can Help You to Maximize Your Workforce

A knowledgeable staffing agent is more than a convenience to busy business owners in need of temp workers or new full-time staff. Business owners know their own company’s needs, but staffing agencies bring their independent, outside assessment to the table and can help companies make the very best hiring decisions. Staffing agencies offer outsourced staffing solutions; whereby, recruitment staff isn’t needed in-house.

Moreover, with a keen understanding of ways to develop the talents of current staff, pinpoint gaps and areas of development, as well as make informed recommendations about hiring, a reputable temp agency can provide valuable insights and advice that can improve any company’s bottom line.

The greatest advantage of outsourcing your hiring and recruitment to a temp agency is that you will gain insight into your own company’s real hiring needs. It turns out that most companies looking to hire are actually overstaffed or underutilizing their current staff. With an in-depth assessment of a company’s strength and weaknesses, a temp agency will prepare a detailed and customized workforce optimization strategy that pinpoints actual hiring needs. Of the most value are their recommendations of how a company might make the most of current staff and maximize their talents and productivity. The result is better employee retention and less expense on excessive hiring.

Temp agencies help business owners with a crucial aspect of business function: employee retention. When a company loses an employee through termination or resignation, the damage does not end there and leaves more than an empty desk or work station. Loss of an employee can, directly or indirectly, hurt a company’s bottom line. In fact, that loss can cost a company up to 150% of the employee’s annual salary. Temp agencies help prevent this damage by increasing efficiency and employee satisfaction and also by carefully matching potential employees to fill vacant positions. With proven strategies for pairing workers and employees based on many detailed criteria, business owners enjoy better employee retention and a satisfied, content staff.

Outsourcing hiring to a temp agency is not a luxury set aside for only the most successful business owners. Even the smallest companies can benefit tremendously and save money in the long run by trusting a reputable staffing agency to take on the task of identifying true hiring needs and then finding the perfect candidate for the position. A temp agency is indeed a time-saver and convenience for business owners; also the valuable insight and independent assessment can improve hiring choices and employee retention.

How Staffing Agencies Can Save you Time and Money

There are a number of ways that staffing agencies can assist you in hiring the right talent for every job opening, but essentially they act as an extension of your existing human resources department. If your HR department consists of only you, the owner, then outsourcing some of your hiring practices can be a tremendous boost to both your productivity and your sanity.

Certain HR decisions, like hiring, can be overwhelming and often bring no immediate monetary return to your company. And hiring the wrong person can have a lasting impact on company morale, productivity and the bottom line. Here just a few ways staffing agencies can take the headache out of hiring.

Easier to Find Employees with Specific Talent

While you probably know your industry very well, you may be hopeless when it comes to understanding some of the niche roles in your company. If you’re not a writer or a designer, you may not know how to attract the right marketing professional to your team. If you’re looking to launch an annual fundraiser, you’ll need an event planner who can help realize your vision. Staffing agencies can help you identify and contact talented individuals you might not know how to find. They can help you assess employees, check their references and identify candidates who will fit your needs.

Reduce the Cost of New Hire, Bad Hires

Hiring any employee is a large investment of time, effort and resources to post a job, screen applicants, interview and then train a new employee. Staffing agencies take that cost out of your hand when you contract their services. Yes, it requires a relatively hefty fee to actually work with the recruiting company, but think about it in long term.

Additionally, using a staffing agency can drastically reduce your chances of making the wrong hire. The Department of Labor estimates the cost of replacing a employee to be one-third of their salary. However, hiring the wrong employee and fixing the mistake within 6 months can cost as much as 2.5 times the person’s salary. Even at $40,000 a year, that is a $120,000 mistake, including their salary.  Isn’t that worth the cost of doing it right the first time?

A Motivated Job Search

Let’s face it: there are a number of tasks that you would prefer to do instead of combing through resumes and applications for the right hire. Many small business owners will drag out the process, costing themselves more money as they struggle by without the proper staff.  Since you’re paying them to find the right employees, a staffing firm will not suffer from a lack of motivation. And since they can only compete on their reputations, these agencies have become skilled at weeding out potential job candidates who are not properly motivated or lack the skills necessary for a specific job. Since they are working for you, not a jobseeker, a recruitment agency will work to assess potential employees to make sure they’re a perfect fit. This will help you cut down the risk of a bad hire, while also minimizing the time and effort spent identifying quality candidates.