In reading Naomi’s good blog article ‘Without great employees you cannot weather the storm‘ she talks about how businesses cannot afford the luxury of unproductive staff and that businesses are and will be looking to cut costs over the coming months. However those that come out on top will be the ones with an A grade team.
Indeed businesses cannot afford to have unproductive staff at any time, namely in challenging times as Naomi highlights.
Unproductive staff can come about through a variety of means, which can sometimes be attributed to the employee. However more often than not the business creates this situation and environment where unproductive people can prosper. Generally speaking most employees don’t wake up and go to work thinking how unproductive can I be today. The average person wants to go to work to be challenged, engaged and add value. They may want flexible work arrangements and other benefits however they also want to do a good job.
Unfortunately running a business, big or small is a challenge and often the bigger the business the more likelihood of having low productivity for it is easy go unnoticed. Businesses that have a high proportion of unproductive employees do so for a many reasons some of which include;
• Lack of workforce planning
• Poor talent attraction and retention
• Lack of leadership
• Poor management
• No succession planning
• Outdated or inefficient business processes and practices
• Don’t provide career support to staff
• Culture of mediocrity
• Failing to innovate and take risks
For some businesses a tough economic environment highlights for them what they have been neglecting and hence the need to lose staff. For others that have their business in order, cutting staff as Naomi has indicated is not the answer, particularly if you have a solid and committed team of great people who are passionate about your business. For businesses to ride the wave and come out on top, they need to be sure that they have the best team to harness the opportunities both now (for they are still there) and in the future.
One Comment
Intersting that these views come to the surface during difficult financial times. In fact I could not agree with you more. Through the use of some detailed Human Capital Analytics and a Workforce segementation methodology we have just created a hypothesis in our business of over 10,000 staff in one of our business units that supports analytically this view point.
When considering key indicators like employee attrition, engagement, absence and sales generation it becomes clear that there are other much more positive opportunities to reduce cost whilst retaining great talent.