Take A More Strategic Approach To Hiring

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I thought it would be interesting to explore the concept of “strategic” when it comes to hiring. Both in terms of positioning hiring within the context of the organisation and when undertaking hiring itself.

One of the challenges when hiring is to move it from a tactical activity, reluctantly undertaken when a vacancy arises, to a strategic activity that contributes to organisational excellence. Until hiring is firmly positioned as a key strategic activity, organisations will face problems such as weak talent pipeline, significant opportunity costs, higher hiring errors (it is worth taking the time to work out the cost of hiring errors), business stagnation and eroded organisational value. Additionally, ambitious business leaders will not invest sufficient time, early enough in their careers, to learning and honing their hiring skills. I have, over the years, worked with many great leaders (visionary, decisive, strategic, charismatic, brilliant) who simply cannot hire well. Yet, hiring the right or wrong people will have a huge impact on the organisation. Recruitment is both an art and a science and organisational leaders need to master both elements

In terms of hiring itself, I would suggest that you need to approach the activity strategically. Namely, to think longer term and put it in a broader context. This will enable you to build organisational capability and bench strength and develop the organisation for longer term growth. Thus, by taking a more strategic approach to recruitment you can recruit for the future at least as much as for the present. By this I mean that you can start to plan the skills and competencies you will need to be successful in the future. It also allows you to hire people today that you can develop into the roles you will need in the future which reduces the amount of ‘crisis’ hiring you need to do which is risky, expensive and can reduce motivation of more junior staff with high potential. I believe that a certain amount of external hiring (rather than all internal promotion) is healthy for an organisation but it needs to be intentional and not forced upon you due to the lack of well-developed internal staff.

Hiring needs to be part of an integrated talent management framework. This sounds complicated and clearly, for very large organisations, it can be, but even with much smaller organisations these elements should be in place: Planning the resources that you need, investing in resourcing (i.e. finding the talent), job design and organisation design (you may need to flex the organisation to allow people to grow and develop), management hiring and selection skills, staff engagement and retention, staff and management development. In my experience, large organisation can lose sight of the ‘why’ and become lost in the systems and infrastructure. They focus on developing complex processes but not deriving real value from them, or even worse, ignoring them when faced with decisions such as a senior promotion. And smaller organisations do not always think broadly enough and can make short term hiring decisions. In my experience, one of the main causes of slow growth in smaller organisations is that they do not hire early enough, or strategically enough.

About the Author

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Hiring Staff | Take A More Strategic Approach To HiringLisette Howlett is author of The Right Hire: Attract And Retain The Best People, a licensed Sandler Trainer located in London Central, and she has fifteen years of global change leadership and business development experience. Howlett is called upon by business owners of small and medium-sized companies for strategy and business development. Her experience includes financial services, technology, pharma/biotech, manufacturing, IT, media, recruitment and professional services.

For more information please visit this link.

Quality Quantified: Learning To Measure Your Employees

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Employee Metrics | Quality Quantified: Learning To Measure Your EmployeesNo two people will perform in exactly the same way when it comes to the work which they do. Some will be able to work for days on end, getting average results while they throw themselves into their work. Others, though, will find it easy to get excellent results, but won’t have the stamina to work for more than a few hours. As an employer, it is extremely important that you are aware of these strengths and weaknesses if you want to be able to leverage them correctly. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring some of the best ways to measure your employees, assessing how well they are working for your business.

Peer-Reviews

While you will get a good insight into your business when you’re able to spend time with it, the people working for you will often have the best idea of how their team mates are getting on. When someone isn’t pulling their weight, for example, most offices will be well aware of it, and people won’t be very happy. Peer-reviews are a great way to overcome this. Once every six months or so, you should have your employees anonymously rate one another on different aspects of their work. In the end, you should be left with a range of interesting statistics.

Of course, when you’re relying on other people to give you information, you have to be wary of pettiness within your ranks. Some team members may simply dislike one another, resulting in negative feedback which doesn’t truly reflect their work. To overcome this, you should be looking for examples of bad feedback which seem to be unanimous, ensuring that you’re not going to pick on someone because other people have decided to be mean to them. This is only the start of your measuring, though.

Personal Development Plans

It can be very easy for people to slip into a pattern with their work when they aren’t pushed to do more with it. This leaves a lot of employees to let their skills become stagnant, and they will never be able to make their role more complicated. Personal development plans have been used by businesses for decades to track their employee’s performance throughout the year. Staying on top of something like this is absolutely crucial, and forgetting to give people their assessments will limit the success you are able to find from it.

This works by talking to your employee and outlining the areas in their work which need to be improved. You can agree on a target for them to reach, along with talking about the way that they will reach it. This works extremely well, as it gives your team the chance to understand how well they are doing, rather than simply working at a job which doesn’t give them any feedback. If you hold meetings with each team member every couple of months, you will quickly see their work start to get better, especially when your employees are young.

Customer Feedback

There are few people in the world who have an insight into your employee’s effectiveness than the customers they work with. Getting feedback from people like this isn’t always easy, but it will open the doors to some truly honest information, and this can be hard to get when you’re only working internally. You should only ever ask for feedback when a customer has had something done for them, like making a purchase or getting some product support, as this will ensure that they have their experience fresh on their mind.

Of course, though, you need to make this as easy as possible, or you could find yourself struggling to get people to fill in your forms. There are loads of companies out there with the tools to help you to collect feedback from your customers. By using a service like this, you will put your surveys into the hands of experienced professionals, ensuring that your customers always have the best experience. As time goes on, you will learn what you need to do to be able to handle jobs like this for yourself.

Digital Metrics

Nothing tells a better story about the success of your team than numbers. When people are working for you, it’s crucial that they have targets in place, and that you have a way to make sure that they are reaching their targets. In the case of a call center, each person on the phones will need to talk to a minimum amount of customers each day. Collecting this information is easy, and you can have your employees do it themselves by simply adding to a spreadsheet whenever they complete a piece of work.

Their Past Experience

When people are trying to get a job from you, they will always give you an idea of what they’ve done in the past. It’s fair to build your expectations for their work out of this, with those who have had very complicated jobs being able to overcome issues which other people won’t be able to face. It’s fair to judge people based on their past experiences, but you have to be careful not to take this too far. Employers will often make the mistake of pushing their best and brightest as hard as they can, leaving those who need motivation the most to struggle, and causing an imbalance of work in the office.

It can be hard to make sure that you’re getting what you pay for when you hire people. A lot of companies spend huge amounts of this area, giving each of their team members enough money to live on, while also paying for loads of other little features which come with them. As time goes on, this will get easier and easier, and you will get better at pushing people in the right direction. Of course, though, this work is very important, and this means that you will need to avoid letting it become too routine, as this will make it easy for employees to get around it.

How To Challenge Your Employees When You Are Away On Business

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Employee Management | How To Challenge Your Employees When You Are Away On Business Being a traveling business owner can have its difficulties sometimes. You may feel that your team just aren’t as productive as they might be when you’re not there to ensure that they are working hard, for example. If that is the case, what can you do?

Something you don’t want to do is to constantly have to check in on them. Not only does that make more work for you, particularly if you have important meetings and conferences to prepare for, but it also makes your employees feel uncomfortable; they will assume you don’t trust them to do their own jobs, and that might reduce productivity in itself. In the worst cases, your staff might even want to look elsewhere for work.

The best thing you can do is to ensure that your employees are engaged and challenged when you are not there. This will make them feel valued because you are trusting them to get more done, and it will give them plenty to occupy themselves with so that there will be nothing for you to worry about. Here are some of the ways they can be challenged when you are working away on business.

Ask For Feedback

Before you leave on your trip, make sure that you speak to your team, either as a group or individually, about what you want from them while you’re away. It’s essential that they know they can check in with you when they need to, even if you’re not in the office, and that you will check in with them too. Make sure they don’t feel pressured or uncomfortable about this – if you are checking in with everyone once a day, no one should feel that they are being singled out.

If possible, start these meetings with your staff before you go. You can arrange:

  • Weekly feedback sessions
  • One to one meetings
  • Weekly reviews

If you start off right at the beginning with this kind of culture of feedback and performance reviews, it won’t seem out of the ordinary if you continue to do it even when you’re working away from your usual location.

Ask your staff to prepare feedback for you so that you can understand what their frustrations are when you’re not there, and if you travel frequently, you can then ensure that the next time you go anywhere, it is better for everyone.

Give Them Harder Tasks

If your workers are doing the same things each and every day, they can easily become bored and frustrated. They might feel as though their job is going nowhere and that they should be looking to do something else with their lives. If you’re not there, that feeling can easily intensify, and you might find you have something of a rebellion to deal with once you get back.

In order to stop this from happening, add some harder tasks to the list of things that you would like to be done while you’re away. This will keep your employees interested and give them more of a challenge. They will feel as though you trust them to do something a little more difficult. Make it clear that you are there to help if they need assistance, otherwise, if the task is brand new and too challenging, you might still have problems. If you can’t be the one to offer assistance, delegate the task to someone else who will look after these issues ins your stead when you are traveling.

Make A Challenge List

In order to challenge your employees in a fun way, you can create a challenge list. This is a list of tasks that can be done at any time and in any order, and that are there to be picked up on once all the other work is done. If someone is particularly looking for an additional challenge, they can go to this list and choose something from it. The list can include anything from researching medical marijuana companies for your business to invest in, to looking up new ways of carrying out old jobs using innovative technology, to making a budget for the next advertising campaign.

The list should be available for all employees to take tasks from and to add tasks to as they think of them. Your job is to periodically check through the list and approve or remove the tasks that are there. The tasks should all be related to the company; there is no point in having anything on the list that isn’t going to benefit the business in the short or long term.

A list like this ensures there are always new challenges to look into, and could almost be seen as a reward for completing the usual tasks in a timely manner. If there is a slow week, or a gap between one project starting and another ending, this will also fill in the time and your employees won’t have a chance to become frustrated, bored, or discontented.

Train Them

No matter how much your employees already know, additional training will always be useful for them, and for you. Keeping your employees fully trained up will clearly benefit your business, but it will also show your team that you are looking out for them, and that you want the best for them. They will be able to do their current jobs more efficiently and with greater confidence, and they will also learn new skills that will benefit everyone within the business.

By offering training when you are away on business, you can provide a change of scenery to your employees, and guarantee that they will have learned something new by the time you return.

Make Your Goals Clear

Your employees may see you heading off for yet another meeting or conference in yet another town or city, or perhaps even a different country, and wonder what you are doing, and what benefit it really all is. Keep your employees engaged and focused by keeping them abreast of all the changes and updates within the company in a timely fashion. When you are going away, explain why – keep them involved. By making your ultimate goals for the business clear, and showing them how their own job can be a part of the end result, your employees will see the challenge ahead of them, and want to do their best with regards to meeting it.

3 Ways to Safeguard the Wellbeing and Productivity of Your Staff

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | 3 Ways to Safeguard the Wellbeing and Productivity of Your Staff | Manage Staff
 
As a business owner, you will almost certainly come to the point of needing to manage staff — assuming you aren’t there already. Though many businesses are born as single-person startups in the solopreneur-spirit, growth invariably brings with it the need for outsourcing of responsibilities.

Of course, managing staff is not necessarily a straightforward and pain-free matter. Unscrupulous and demotivated workers can cost you money, and excessive gossip and office politics can sour the entire nature of your business and reduce teamwork and joint productivity.

Among the many requirements of good team management is the ability to safeguard the wellbeing and productivity of your staff. Here are a few strategy suggestions for doing just that.

Allow them a degree of flexibility in terms of working hours and physical location

It’s a fairly well-agreed-upon idea that employees tend to work better, and be more invested in the overall success and wellbeing of the company at large, when they feel that they are being treated with a degree of respect and consideration by their employers.

The traditional office dynamic of arriving at a certain time each day, and clocking off at a certain time each afternoon, is still very much in place as a rule, but is starting to soften significantly, with many businesses allowing for flexible hours and remote working arrangements.

Incentivise your customers to work more diligently, and enjoy their work more, by allowing them a degree of flexibility over their time and location. This could mean allowing them to clock off for the day whenever they want, as long as they meet their targets. Or it could mean allowing them to work from home for a couple of days a week.

Sponsor them for training and educational courses and programs

Investing in your employees via sending or sponsoring them for training and certifications not only helps to improve their professional portfolio, thereby enhancing their well-being, but it also makes them more directly useful for you, as their employer — that is, assuming you run your business in such a way that people don’t want to flee as soon as they have other options available.

It might be that you’re flush with resources and can sign some of your senior people up for an online MBA, or it might be that you see the benefit in putting the whole office through first aid training.

In any event, supporting your staff with this kind of training can be a great way of boosting wellbeing and productivity.

Find ways to grant your staff a greater sense of meaning during the day — such as by empowering them to work on some of their own projects, some of the time

In recent times, many high-flying companies have famously opted to give their staff a greater sense of meaning and freedom during the day, by allocating a certain amount of their working time to personal projects.

This has been particularly prevalent in the tech industry, with Google famously having followed such a policy. The upshot of doing this is that your staff feel that their own creative impulses are better represented by the company, and that they have more breathing room to do meaningful — not just obligatory — work.

How to Motivate Your Sales Team: 7 Tested and Proven Strategies

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | How to Motivate Your Sales Team: 7 Tested and Proven StrategiesSales is the core of the business and the team behind it drives the company’s growth and success. They are responsible for the 2 most important things in a business: customers and revenue.

Every business owner or executive should acknowledge the critical role of the sales team in the organization. They should be always motivated, developed, and inspired for them to consistently perform.

Here are proven strategies to make your sales team successful:

1. Establish trust

Trust is a fundamental core value of every organization. The business can’t run effectively without it. Teams can’t work together without trusting each other. That’s why it’s important for a leader to establish full trust across the organization.

Offering full trust to your sales team goes two ways:

  • You will need to win their trust completely
  • You will need to give them your trust 100%

Establishing full trust with your sales team starts with setting the correct and honest expectations. You need to be clear about the following:

  • What’s their objective/purpose in the business?
  • What do you expect them to deliver and in what time schedule?
  • What are their targets?
  • How will you measure their success?
  • How are you going to reward them?

The second step is to let them do their job as salespeople. Lastly, you’ll have to deliver your part of the bargain, which is to consistently work with them to achieve their targets, review their performance and give them their due rewards.

2. Give them visibility to the strategy

Part of what drives the sales team to deliver their optimum performance is to give them visibility of the company’s strategy. It is important that they know where the company is heading and what’s their part in it.

Moreover, enable your sales team to be equipped as they help steer the company’s strategy. You will need to provide them access to metrics, statistics, analytics and every piece of data about the company. This information will help them forecast their output in a timely manner aligned with the company strategy.

3. Establish SMART goals

SMART stands for:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Realistic and
  • Time-bound

This is a basic methodology for goal setting. It is critical to establish smart goals with your sales team in order for them to know what are you expecting from them.

Work with your sales team to agree on a defined daily, weekly, monthly and/or annual sales objectives. The key is to have a limited number of objectives or goals that are aligned with the company strategy. Then, enable with them tools that will help them track their goals against their performance.

4. Put in place an effective reward system

Sales teams are driven by rewards. They perform more when they know what they’re getting in return. That said, it is highly critical to put an effective reward system to keep your sales team inspired. For example, come up with an enticing commission agreement and/or sales incentives.

Some of the key elements of an effective reward system are the following:

  • A specific result or quota that will let them earn the rewards
  • A clear process of how the reward will be earned
  • Timeline of when they can earn and/or when the reward will be given
  • Ability for the individual to choose the type of reward they want to receive

Enabling your sales team to choose the type of reward they want will keep them excited. Start by sending out a survey to every individual so you’ll know what their expected reward is.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | How to Motivate Your Sales Team: 7 Tested and Proven Strategies5. Make your sales team fall in love with the company

This is rather difficult but once successfully pulled off, you’ll have the best succession plan in the company. Moving your sales team away from the employee mindset and offering them the idea of being ‘company owners’ is critical.

Get them involved in building the company’s mission, vision and core values. Steer them away from being stimulated by their paycheck and let them become passionate about their contribution to the company. This may or may not work with all the individuals in your sales team but at least you’ll know who among them is truly involved.

6. Allow them to be flexible and proactive

Your sales team doesn’t become sales rock stars overnight. That said, allow them to be flexible enough in achieving their targets. It will require you to provide consistent guidance and follow through with their output.

On top of that, encourage your sales team to be proactive in all areas. Let them explore new angles and come up with out-of-the-box ideas. Moreover, encourage them to freely present these ideas and implement them.

7. Provide them with opportunities and growth

It is critical to provide your sales team with enough opportunities for growth. This will keep them stimulated knowing the fact that they know where they’re going if they become successful in the company. Keep in mind that a salesperson wouldn’t want to be a salesperson forever.

Putting a clear development and growth plan for the sales individuals is one of the required duties of a leader. There should be a clear and defined path for a salesperson to go to the next level in the organizational structure.

Conclusion

Motivating your sales team is a top priority. It requires diligent thought process and involvement with the team. Moreover, upgrading their performance will require time, consistency and commitment. These effective and tested strategies can help you build a successful sales team that’s always inspired and motivated. These should be an integral part of the core priorities of the company.