Workforce Solutions That Work!
5 Best Practices to Manage, Monitor, and Maintain your Workforce
Your decisions and efforts can create and maintain an enthusiastic, productive, and progressive workforce. They can also puncture gaping holes in your organization’s pipeline and create a toxic atmosphere — draining market competiveness and talent.
Dear HR, here’s your simple, evergreen, and agile checklist of the best proven practices that you should use to manage, monitor, and maintain a thriving workforce.
1# — Create a Progressive Environment
Give your employees a work environment where they can see themselves growing continuously through available challenging opportunities.
Create detailed, “branching” career pathways for employees. Work with line managers to identify individual and strategic (departmental) opportunities, and create new job descriptions for employees. Every individual is motivated differently — some by learning, some by competitiveness, other by accolades, etc. You have to find what could motivate them and leverage it to create job descriptions and opportunities they will willingly want to accept and grow.
2# — Build a Culture of Internal Promotion
Consistently create and update career paths for employees for different positions. Let them know, and promote people who meet the criteria. When employees know what is needed to gain the next promotion, they will be more willing to align their efforts with strategic company goals.
This also grants you the flexibility to create new career paths, and recreate older ones for existing employees. Make the career paths modular, clearly informing employees the new job descriptions they can add to their existing ones to move on towards a path they like.
3# — Make Managers Offer Personalized, Constructive Feedback
No one wants to know that they are doing the same job (they have been doing for 2 years) very well. Prevent stagnation and boost personal development for your employees by making your reviews more frequent and personalized.
The more personalized and constructive the feedback is, the more you and the employee will be able to realize opportunities available to them. For instance, identifying skills they have demonstrated and can easily hone for a career path, or possible utility of their skill set to aid the organization achieve its goals.
This requires consistent monitoring so that a single instance (good/bad effort) does not overshadow what they have been doing over the long run.
#4 — Conduct “Stay in” Interviews
You take exit interviews to know why people are leaving. At max, it can show what you’ve possibly done wrong in the company.
By conducting stay-in interviews for people who have become long-tenured workers gives you insights into what is working, and what your employees think needs improvement.
This is one of the workforce solutions your company should use to create a space where individuals can openly co-innovate with you to create better business process, workflows, and environment.
#5 — Foster Employee Empowerment and Development
Foster a culture of mentoring and training for employees. Let them know that they know their stuff and that the managers hope to empower them further.
This is crucial for three reasons: to avoid employee frustration and stagnation, to keep your talent pool market competitive, and to ensure that your institutional knowledge can easily be passed on to newer hires.
So, how many of these workforce solutions are you using? Share your thoughts!