Given that employees quit bosses rather than companies, it’s time businesses identified what the triggers of mismanagement are. Is it a managerial move that impacted your workforce, or a more sinister problem that wasn’t addressed despite being brought up on previous occasions?
Mismanaged employees lead to lapsed productivity and disinterest in work. The signs include limited interactions with fellow colleagues, lack of accountability over unfinished work, incomplete knowledge transfers and handovers. But the worst of it all is that quality of work gets affected, costing you your customer base.
Employee management is all about hiring and retaining the best people. After all, how far they’re able to go in their role is what determines both business efficiency and professional success. In other words, employee management involves an overhaul of your workforce in terms of departmental roles, utilization of skills in daily tasks and how much of their time goes into core work over meetings and other workplace distractions. It means setting and managing expectations while learning to balance competing interests.
Here are the 5 employee management benefits that bolster business efficiency
- Impactful decision making
Data is the engine powering modern businesses. Whether hosted on the cloud or on premises, databases that sync employee records to existing systems are vital to find and match competent resources to relevant work. The information contained within about your staff would comprise of their schedules, skills reports, work done, number of years in service, certifications obtained and productivity rates on prior and current assignments.
This is why decision makers are turning their attention towards a visually interactive resource management software. With the plethora of tools that are molded to capture every businesses’ unique need, it makes sense, to use a project management aide that doubles up as a resource-specific business intelligence suite. It lets you manage multiple schedules (including your own!) and puts available skills to optimal use such that you’re assured of staffing every kind of work with the right hands at all times.
- Incentivizes collaborative efforts
Collaboration over competition, always. The more supportive your teams are of one another’s work, the higher are the chances work gets done without incident. Collaboration not only gets your employees talking but also enables skills diversification, i.e. it enables your staff to contribute on cross-departmental endeavors making use of a secondary skill subset.
This is a win-win for both you as an employer and your staff. For one, you don’t have to look far for additional resources to deploy onto starving projects. You could instead, tap into potential from within and save thousands of hours and costs that would otherwise go into training new recruits till they gain total mastery over work. And secondly, you can minimize bench-time clunks drastically by taking advantage of idling time in between projects. As for employees, they can explore areas of interest that they’d like to be more involved in, in the future, rather than thinking they’ve exhausted their professional opportunities.
- Regularizes Appraisal processes
While employees know what performance appraisals are for, no one likes unpleasant surprises regarding their work conduct when year-end reviews roll around. In reality, your staff are better engaged and motivated when they know what their employer looks for when gauging team-wide performances. And this is precisely what standardizing appraisal processes do. It lets you reward stellar employees while also initiating performance improvement plans for those who need help getting back on track.
Besides being reason enough to improve employee morale, appraising your staff lets them know you are appreciative of the effort and hours dedicated to their role. It removes any uncertainties regarding skills relevance, future employability and change management measures, thus paving the way to a holistic and healthy work culture. Consequently, happy employees are more likely to spread that positivity to whoever they interact with, whether it’s a fellow colleague or client!
- Streams business-wide communication
Disjointed communication leads to dysfunctional teams, simple as that. For one, when teams grow in size, so do the scale of conversations, whether they happen in the form of casual conversations, remotely or via personal messages. As a result, important information such as action items and status updates risk getting lost in the sea of exchanges. This delays responses and stalls decisions for high-priority work.
One of the benefits of employee management here, is that communication gets streamlined and hosted onto a dedicated platform. This way, your workforce is instantly online and connected to both their work and teams. It not only lets them stay on top of their tasks, but also enables them to self- track their progress as well as be in the know of what their colleagues are on. They can even use the portal to arrange one on one sessions or reschedule meetings and discussions according to new availability.
- Professional growth opportunities
Not offering your key workers opportunities to reskill or upskill existing competencies causes stagnation, both in work quality and interest levels. While good employee management recognizes and rewards exceptional employees, the best measures exemplify such work by enabling future readiness.
With the growth spurt of technologies such as data science, decision analytics, AI and IOT networks, it makes sense for your staff to raise their capabilities and credentials by enrolling on study programs offered online via micro learning open courses. This way, they are ready to not only explore but also take on newer lines of service. Instead of benching critical staff, you can allocate them onto training measures such that they’re ready for immediate deployment once they complete the courses they’re on. This way, your staff wouldn’t fear being made redundant on account of not having enough experience or the right competencies.
It’s important to remember that your employees are an indispensable asset to your company. Even with the best possible usage of technology and services, you still need them to deliver desired results, realize benefits and boost business efficiency. You are as accountable to them as they are to you. Mismanaging employees prompts them to consider resigning on their own terms rather than risk being told their job is on the line when they’re not completely at fault. It causes you to overlook good skills, leadership ability and experiential instincts. With the employee measures listed here, though you’ll not only cultivate strong team dynamics but will also enable your staff to leverage their skills, leadership ability and experiential instincts to scale in the direction of business growth!
Aakash Gupta is the Director of Marketing and Sales at Saviom Software. His works on project resource management and workforce planning has been published in the business technology space. Connect with him here to start a conversation!