Maintaining the growth of a business can be a challenging task. One area that gets hit hard is your HR department and maintaining your labor force. Increasing your labor force is about much more than names on a roster. The more employees you can hire with the skills your company needs, the faster you can incorporate them into productivity. Whether you’re looking for a permanent hire, a temp-to-hire position, or looking to incorporate both into your company’s labor force, the tips below can help you bring on and maintain the very best employees.
Flexibility
Recent world events have left many business owners looking to explore new methods of operation. It’s no secret that many companies have embraced a new, remote, work-from-home culture. Did you know that having this type of flexibility in the way your business operates allows for some unique opportunities?
Consider this
- Remote, work-from-home positions can be filled by anyone, anywhere. This allows you to find the best candidates and solutions for your business needs, from all over the planet.
- Your business could be operating successfully in several different time zones.
- Work hours can easily be scaled up or down as business needs demand.
- Work-from-home employees typically cost less than an average employee when you factor in equipment and commercial mortgage costs.
An employee who can work from home doesn’t need to worry about daycare or their daily commute. Instead, you can utilize the services of an employee who can fully focus on your needs while enjoying the flexibility of a work-from-home position that supports their schedule requirements.
Encourage Input
If you’ve lost people to the trend of quiet quitting or are concerned that your employees are losing engagement in their jobs, it’s time to ask for input on what will make their jobs more rewarding.
Once an employee feels voiceless in your organization, your risk of losing both the employee and all the training you invested in them will go up. To avoid having all those dollars walk out the door, it may be worth a conversation. Go ahead and point out that they’ve gotten rather quiet. Find out if their lack of engagement is related to personality issues, personal issues, or other factors.
Do be aware that their issue may be with you. If you know of someone in management who has a strong relationship with the employee, ask them to start the conversation. Bringing a good employee back online will be much easier than retraining a new person. You can also boost loyalty by digging down into the problem and addressing it.
Teaming With An Expert
Being flexible in your business operations could extend far past work-from-home opportunities. If your business is more industrialized, and work-from-home options are not realistic, there are still many ways to remain flexible. Let’s take a look at how you are hiring your labor force.
If your business is like many others, you may experience issues with maintaining a balance in your labor force. This may be happening a couple of times a year for you, as demand for your products rise and fall throughout the year. The biggest challenge you may face is maintaining proper employee levels in your workforce when you need them.
Becoming flexible in the way your company hires its employees can do a great deal to alleviate some of the issues you and your HR departments may face. You may consider teaming up with an expert hiring agency to fill supporting positions for your permanent staff. You can quickly get some more hands into your workplace without having to go through the paperwork, the onboarding, or interviewing process. This is a quick and effective way to ensure your labor shortages are solved without having a painful layoff when the company slows down.
You may want to talk to headhunters in Tulsa and other areas nationwide about increasing your starting staff population or bringing in temporary workers for bulk projects. Talk to your agent about your business so they can create a custom plan to solve your labor issues. Make sure to select a nationally-operated company to ensure you are finding the best candidates from the country.
Promote From Within
If you have a current roster of employees, consider the ways they can contribute to a new and improved workforce for your business. The downfall of using a temp service to add more hands to your team is the lack of experience that comes with those new hands. Make sure you select some strong leaders from your current team to help temporary workers and new hires in the workplace.
Your leaders should have strong skills in synthesis, or taking disparate data and skills and creating concepts that everyone can understand. Your leaders should be able to multitask. If you have a staff member who is the go-to person for training new folks, you may well have a new manager ready for new responsibilities.
If you notice that someone has strong computer skills, ask them to present a favorite spreadsheet or table trick at a staff meeting. They may have some discomfort stepping up and presenting to their co-workers, but presentation skills can be taught. As a business leader, think of yourself as a coach. An employee with respectable software skills and teaching skills should be encouraged to practice their presentation skills.
Note Who’s Eager For Training
Subscribe to a series of training videos and see who bites. There may be some who claim to be too busy to train, but someone who’s eager to grow will find the time. Since many of these courses will be video-based, make sure that everyone has access to private headphones.
Set up a custom time entry code for this training and work with HR to create a log of which employees participate. You need employees who will take the initiative to increase their skill set in the small moments of time they have free during the day. If you see employees who have time to socialize and others using downtime to train, you have valuable information that you can use going forward.
The world of work has changed radically since 2020. If you have the option to offer remote work, on the job advanced training and the chance to learn to present on the clock, you are ideally set up to allow enterprising employees the chance to increase both their skillset and their contribution. Everybody wins!
