October 24, 2013 – ISSN# 1545-2646
Being Strategically Flexible
As employers, one of the biggest assets to your organization is your people. It is also one of the largest and more challenging parts of running your business.
From hiring the right people, investing into them through training, managing the associated personal and professional dynamics, rewarding for a job well done and engaging them on missed performance objectives, these and many others touch the surface of your talent management efforts.
You then need to take all of those elements and layer in the age, gender, social background, etc. and the landscape of attracting and leveraging talent successfully is almost a full time job in and of itself.
Because your business needs people to do business – you are not a lights out manufacturing plant with robots, you had better think and plan strategically about your workforce. You can no longer just tell people this is your workspace and they have to just live with it. – Well, you can but be prepared to have a very high turnover factor adding many additional dollars to your expense line and dropping your profitability.
Alternatively, you can identify those key factors of the workforce you want and need to attract and provide parts of their needs through your business. You might call it win/win from the 90’s and early turn of the century but today it is part of the employment landscape for business owners who are strategically building not just the business but the entire value of the asset.
For example, a business wants to cater to college student aged employees so they need to work around various educational needs of that target audience such as class schedules, exams, labs etc. To do this they use a scheduling system which is totally automated and available to their employees on their smart phones. Managers post up coming work schedules and the employees craft their own schedules by accepting time slot assignments. The manager then knows who is working when and which shifts need additional support in advance. The employees can also give back work shifts by posting a change and other employees pick up those extra hours to make sure the schedule is always at full complement.
So strategically approaching a staffing issue can be turned into a process which enable both staff and management to deliver a consistent flow of talent to meet with customer needs.
This week, step back away from your biggest issue and see if you can approach it more strategically rather than operationally.
Stumped on moving from operational thinking to strategic thinking? Give JKL Associates a call at (313) 527-7945.
Questions or comments – email us at partners@jklassociates.com or call our Office at (313) 527-7945
Copyright – JKL Associates 2013
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