Putting your people first
Every organisation is shaped by its people. From recruitment to training, development, and retention, effective people management is essential to keeping your business on track. Finding and keeping the right people in the right places at the right time will enable your organisation to innovate and grow.
When questioned, a staggering 52 per cent of exiting employees say that their manager or organisation could have done something to stop them leaving. Could have – but didn’t, either because they didn’t realise the employee was unhappy, or because they didn’t know how to manage the situation.
How can businesses address this issue?
Putting strong people management skills and strategies in place is key to attracting and keeping the people your business needs. Alongside this is the need to ensure your processes are robust, so that your people managers’ time is spent on the people and not on trying to work out the best way to move a process forward.
3 process areas where you can help you people managers to save time and effort are:
- Recruitment
- Performance Management
- Learning & Development
Keeping your people
The People Ecosystem model recognises that effective people-management skills should be woven into the structure of your organisation. Instead of waiting for something to go wrong, we’ll help you to develop the processes and activities you need to make sure things go right – for your employees and for the performance of your business as a whole.
Finding the right people
Effective recruitment not only means being clear about what – and who – you are looking to add to your organisation, it’s also understanding what you can offer to your employees. Efficient and robust processes can help you to find, attract and recruit the right people to make your business shine.
As tempting as it is to recruit the person you like, or the candidate who seems to ‘fit’ best, this is unlikely to help your long-term development. With a firm recruitment strategy in place, you can make sure you are bringing in the people you need to challenge your assumptions, disrupt your outlook, innovate, and ultimately grow your company. Frequently we now hear the organisations are not looking for ‘Culture Fit’, but for ‘Culture Development’ when considering new hires.
Managing performance
Once you’ve hired the right people, how do you keep their performance on track? To some organisations, ‘performance management’ is what you do when things are going wrong. In reality organisations benefit when the management of performance is something which is woven into everyone’s day to day activities from day one of employment.
It is an accepted truth that when dealing with poor performance, 20% of the people will take up 80% of the manager’s time. This creates a situation where the high performers are left to their own devices and the middle performers never get the support they need to step up. With the right processes, the poor performers can be addressed with much less time and energy allowing the managers to focus their energy where the most gain can be achieved for the individual and the organisation.
Given the right people management skills and processes, accountability for individual performance shifts and this enables performance management to be a conversation, not a confrontation.
Developing people and skills
It used to be a common concern that if an organisation invested in their people, it would make them more likely to leave. With the employment market as it is, there are few organisations who can afford NOT to develop their people. Frequently now, candidates are choosing roles based on the development opportunities.
Forward thinking organisations have people development as a key part of their people strategy and ensure their people managers are driving regular conversations centred around the employees’ development needs in line with strategic needs. The smart thing to do is to be proactive from the start and not end up like a deer caught in the headlights when one of your top performers delivers an ultimatum, or worse still, hands in their notice without having a conversation about their development.
The People Ecosystem
The People Ecosystem model aims to give people managers the tools and skills to do their jobs well – from recruitment strategies, through onboarding, performance management, people development and employee retention. We work with you and your business to make sure you are hiring the right people, understanding their needs, and supporting them to achieve their potential.
Contact me
To find out how the People Ecosystem model can improve people management in your organisation, contact me on LinkedIn or by phone on 07848 872018, or email at pdennitts@advogroup.co.uk.
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