Workforce management constitutes some of the most costly mistakes in challenging industries. It makes perfect sense as well. If you are in one of the emerging long term industries like AI, cryptocurrency, IOT etc. ; chances are you are having a hard time finding and managing skilled individuals. After all, in certain industries the skilled workforce is crowded while the opposite situation persists in industries that is rapidly growing, leveraging and pivoting. The following are some handpicked points adopted and utilized for years by the AI leaders in Bangladesh; Socian Ltd.
1) Autonomy is the key to Workplace Satisfaction:
While I am boss mentality can create an internal confidence and accountability to employees; we have found fear to be very much counter-productive. Employees tend to work with much more concentration if they have autonomy over their work flow. A great practice can be Work or Result oriented workflow instead of time oriented. To execute this, all you need to do is assign the specific work and give a deadline. It doesn’t matter if he worked 8 hours or 2 hours; as long as the work is done, he’s in the green zone. Give employees more working autonomy because control is the best incentive. A kanban board can be very effective.
2) Communication is the best Ice-breaker:
A lot of time and resources are spent in ice-breaking for many employees. The best way to break the nervousness of the employee is to personally communicate with them. It’s productive to have a chain of command; but even the CEO should be communicating with every employee in certain intervals except for occasional meetings and reporting. Send them hand-written letters, appreciate them, ask them about life and so on.
3) Skills are easier to cultivate than Mindset:
You are in a blue ocean probably with your innovative ideas. Chances are you will not find the most skilled and witty employee in that field from day one. If it was so easy to learn and utilize, the number of competitors would be crawling. In such situations, mentoring is key. But the mindset of your employee actually defines how successfully can it be achieved. Is he a learner with passion or an arrogant workaholic? There are a lot of variables but to be precise, consider more on someone’s mindset over skillset if you aim to mentor them in tasks as well.
4) Make a Return of Interest Analysis:
Currently the market has so many metrics to set the KPI and KVI of your employees. But often their purposes are missed. Hiring employees is an investment and every investment demands profit either it be in intellect, money, opportunities, network etc. Ensure that you get desired outputs from your employees.
5) Collaborate and Co-operate:
Corporate culture is never a lone wolf scenario and particularly in an evolving industry it is too risky to depend on a single person’s creativity and skills. Make sure to create collaborative projects. Balance the boundaries of department while deploying multiple departments on a single task to collaborate and co-operate.
6) Be a critic of their works:
Be very clear about your desired and achieved outputs from your employees. We have had sprints with and without constructive criticism and some with way too much criticism. Turns out that clear and constructive criticism can double the output. Ask yourself if they deserve the criticism and if the answer is ‘yes’; be extremely clear.
7) Find the overwork-underwork Balance:
There’s a fine line between overworking and underworking that we could only extract through monitoring. With the help of our awesome HR we could observe the stress levels and performances across multiple time limits. Make sure your HR helps to find the optimum working hours, intervals and leave hours for every employee. This can maximize the productivity literally.
8) Extract Potential:
Last and final point is to teach your employees in fields external to what they are paid for working in. While this sounds unrealistic and anti-profit; chances are you can extract potential better employees by this one simple step. We had developers transition to HR and designers transition ton sales. You never know what potential someone holds.
These are all for today folks. Godspeed from the Socian Family.
Recent Comments