The job market is tight for employers and likely to grow tighter as inflationary pressures climb. If your focus is on maintaining high quality and productivity, your workforce must be top-notch. Keeping the best employees and keeping them engaged is just part of your goal.
Increase Wages
If you're losing trained employees to other companies because the employee can get better pay elsewhere, it's time to pay your employees more. Employees are facing a serious pinch from inflationary pressures. They also have goals and dreams they're working towards. Even if they love their job, they may be looking elsewhere.
No matter how hard you have worked to build a positive working community, many employees took the lessons of 2020 hard. The pandemic brought home just how expendable some employees were to their employers, and the relationship between employer and employee changed as a demographic. Many employees are working to build up side hustles or looking to start their own businesses. If they can find a job that will pay them more for the hours they put in, they'll likely take it.
Offer Terrific Training
Every employee in your organization needs to keep learning to stay valuable to your team. Offer them the chance to keep growing at staffing industry conferences in 2022 and forward. If you can offer great training and increase compensation and titles as it is applied, you can grow a highly skilled leadership team over time.
Find out employee strengths and goals. If you have an admin person with a strong troubleshooting ability, offer them training on new software and then ask them to train others. If you have an intern who has a strong grasp of workflow pressure, assign them the task of noticing bottlenecks before they completely shut down your team. The intern will need to report to you, but their information can save everyone on your team a great deal of stress.
Certification training, or training that offers a special certification, degree or diploma, is another consideration. If you choose an accredited certification course, as for example an ISO online course, you'll go beyond merely providing training as you'll also receive objective evidence that your staff achieved the required skills and competencies. This is an important consideration for all companies with an ISO management system.
Rely On Your In-House Experts
You may have an area in your facility that is always a mess or a source of bottlenecks. Now is the time to find out what you can do to move things along. For example, you may have a manufacturing firm and a small assembly line. If one workstation is awkward or poorly laid out, find out what changes need to be made by talking to the person struggling in the space.
The changes could be quite small; perhaps tools stored on shelves need to be placed in drawers or stored at eye level. Maybe the work table is too small or the wrong shape. Imposing change on a struggling employee is seldom effective and may cause resentment; you could lose a good employee with great ideas because nobody ever asked for their suggestions.
Offer Flexibility
If 2020 taught us anything, it's that the hours from 8 to 5 are not sacrosanct. You may have employees with small children who can log on at 5 a.m. and get a great deal done before the office even opens. You may have night owls who are crazy productive from 11 pm to 3 am. Let those folks share their most productive time with your organization. If you don't, someone else will.
As you allow remote workers to do more from home, take a look at your admin team and what this pressure is doing to them. Coming in at 8 and finding several projects that need to be addressed because someone else worked overnight may be invigorating or might be stressful. If your support folks are feeling overwhelmed, you may need to offer split shifts and other flexible options to them.
Focus On Safety
Whether it's time to talk about active shooter drills, weather warnings, or bomb threats, make sure everyone in your facility is trained in the steps to stay safe. You may need to hire a safety manager or assign someone from your QC team to track those concerns.
If people in the shop need to wear safety glasses, everyone in the facility needs them. If there are flammable chemicals stored anywhere on your property, everyone needs to know where the fire extinguisher is and how to use it. Be prepared to be a stickler about this; sometimes, showing an employee that you care about their well-being means being pushy.
Well-compensated employees are likely to be happier on the job, and happy people are more productive. Highly skilled employees are likely to get more done, and you can offer training to build those skills. Employees are an investment, from new software training to safety go