Simply put – if you are not proactively managing your greatest asset and getting the results which you want then the only other option is your greatest asset is managing you. If they are managing you then they are not your greatest asset – you are THEIR greatest asset. The key word in all of this is “proactively”. I see a lot of organizations who are fighting fires, running the recruiting treadmill, onboarding as fast as they can and doing it all again when they have the inevitable turnover.
All organizations have strategies and plans for marketing, sales, finance, budgets and operations. When you ask them for their written Human Capital Strategy and Plan - they have nothing to offer. Almost always the response is “we try to hire the best people”. I wonder how your bank would respond if you told them “we will need some money once in a while”?
Thirty years ago when I was first thrown into people management, we had 50+ offices scattered all over the world and we had thousands of highly skilled technicians. We had no cohesive people strategies or plans and we were a classic example of a fire fighting, non-proactive organization. Not surprisingly, we had employee turnover which was bleeding us out. We were going out of business if we did not fix it. As I tried to get my arms around what was going on it became clear - we did not know who we were as an Employer. We did not have a cohesive, well thought out value based compensation plan – we paid for time served. We did a ton of training because our techs were highly skilled; but it too was not coordinated with the other parts of our Human Capital strategy. We had no workforce plan, training plan or plan to coordinate our offices work crews.
The bottom line we were doing NOTHING in a proactive manner to manage our greatest asset. Clearly we had to start by identifying our employer brand, who are target candidates were, develop a value-based compensation plan and numerous other strategies and plans. We also performed employee surveys to find out what our employees were thinking. What were their top issues? What did they see as the biggest problems? We also asked for any suggestions – several of which had direct impact on what we ended up doing. It was a major change in mind set and the new mind set resulted in zero turnover in our Senior Techs – who were our main money makers.
Would you like help in reshaping your mindset?
