Getting the best out of everyone
Maximising the performance of staff is a constant challenge, not least of which because a step too far can lead to outcomes diametrically opposed to those for which everyone had hoped. Pressure to perform, and in particular pressure to perform beyond personal capability, can lead to protracted sickness absence or a high staff turnover both of which are expensive, time consuming and add to the work of a probably already overburdened HR Department. Poorly delivered pressure to perform can also lead to grievances, stress and claims of bullying under the Prevention of Harassment Act.
Maximising performance is about dealing with capability issues at both ends of the spectrum. Managing, developing and motivating the talent you have and dealing with areas of poor performance which might have been overlooked or even tolerated in a resource rich organisation - few will have that luxury any more.
It is obvious that recognising and developing talent is good for the business and for the individual, which in turn develops loyalty. Carefully managed it can also provide encouragement for other members of workforce. However care needs to be taken not to develop a competitive environment where there are winners and losers and where managers feel threatened by star performers who are, perhaps, more junior than them.
Poor performers create bad feeling in the workplace, particularly if there is pay parity between them and those who are delivering the goods. Ensuring your people managers have the skills and confidence to initiate those difficult conversations and to coach and monitor performance without resorting to bullying behaviours will become increasingly vital to the health of your organisation as increasingly there are potentially fewer customers with higher expectations of value for money.
Of course, getting the best out of staff starts with good recruitment and selection practices – square pegs in round holes are never going to feel comfortable nor are they going to give your organisation their best performance. However, as unemployment rises as is predicted so the pool of candidates for posts in your organisation will grow – one of the few silver linings in the current difficult times. Finding and recruiting the right applicant for your post will require careful planning and skill.
If your organisation is not clear about the skills and behaviours it needs to deliver a product or service that outperforms those of your competitors, the risks to the organisation are substantial. Attracting and selecting the candidate that meets the identified needs is a complex process and as the unemployed become more desperate so applications are prone to become more fanciful, making selection that bit more difficult, with checks and references growing in importance.
Organisations are well advised to ensure that hiring managers have the full gambit of tools available to them, as the cost of getting it wrong far exceeds the cost of doing everything practicable to get it right. Hiring managers should be encouraged to consider skills testing and even assessment centres for those key roles. There is a common myth that assessment centres are only for senior posts but assessment centres can be designed for any level of post and the reputation of an organisation may as contingent on the people skills of the receptionist as on the management skills of the HR Director. It is a truism that a satisfied customer tells 2 people about their experience of your organisation but a dissatisfied customer will tell 10 – those 8 people may make the difference between the survival of your organisation or not.
For organisations facing acquisition or merger, being clear about the skills and behaviours needed to take the new organisation forward is the very foundation of any restructuring that may follow TUPE. Auditing the skills and competences of a workforce already bruised from a restructure can be difficult even if you already know just what skills and behaviours you need to take the organisation forward and Cullen Scholefield have encountered organisations for whom crystal ball- and star- gazing seemed to be the preferred method of defining essential skills !
One of the most successful ways of downsizing a workforce is to test the skills and competence of the existing staff and select those for redundancy who do not meet the identified skills set. Provided your assessment centre is diversity proofed, there can be no room for successful claims of unfair selection or discrimination and most importantly you can be sure that those who stay are those with proven aptitude.
The final building block is that of training needs analysis. As organisations diversify, staff are required to be more flexible and so need to have a wider set of skills or even different skills. Skills audit and training needs analysis become crucial activities in ensuring the health of the organisation and its dependence on getting the very best out of everyone.
Investing to save time and money on those expensive and time consuming areas of grievance, high staff turnover, high sickness absence and even Employment Tribunal claims means that HR has more time available to concentrate on activities which contribute to the strategic plan and take the organisation forward.
Cullen Scholefield can help you to have the right people in the right place with the right skills by
- Working with you to define the skills and behaviours your organisation needs to be successful; and
- Working with you to develop assessment centres that identify those skills and behaviours as an aid to recruitment, redundancy selection or changing culture – nothing comes off the shelf, everything is bespoke just for your organisation.
- Training your managers to initiate those difficult conversations and to competently and confidently manage capability.
- Designing skills audit and training needs analysis for your organisation.
Or join our Circle of Peers and, in total confidentiality, share experiences with others facing similar challenges.
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