As an HR person or entrepreneur, you probably regularly face difficulties managing your employees in order to get the best out of your staff.
For example, some area of the company is dipping and you need to figure out why or there are emotional situations in the workplace that force you to choose sides and play politics. More often than not, you will need some sort of system that can help you prevent this from happening.
If you don’t sort it out, you could be facing, at worst, unemployment or bankruptcy. Employees are expensive so they should bring a lot to the table.
Recently, the workforce has undergone an insane shift with all the new technical advances in society as well as how cheap communication has become and how entitled people have become from cell phones and social media.
I want to help you avoid getting kicked out of a job or being attacked by your employer because you can’t effectively change the workplace. Or if you are a business owner, to have your business collapse from HR issues. Because you should have a fighting chance to make your business thrive. You deserve to have the tools, so today we are going to explore 4 major HR blunders that could mean the end of you. And also how you can fix it.
1. Not Having Statistics
Lets face it, you need to be able to directly and obviously track what each person is doing. Stats and graphs are a perfect way to determine exactly who needs help, who needs discipline and who needs rewards.
You need to know exactly which directions your various staff are headed and exactly how fast they are moving there. You can only do this if you have full statistics in place for every single post and each person has statistics that are actually going to effectively bring about real and honest production that helps the organization.
Companies run with sensible statistics generally have 400% greater employee productivity.
Here are a couple tips for establishing a stats system with your company:
You must figure out EXACTLY what you want each employee or position to produce in order to feed into the overall plan of the company.
Rewards and penalties are critical when linked with target attainment. Nothing is more dull than a company that doesn’t give fun and games to the employees.
If you have a central area that collects the statistics and reports on them, the communication of the overall scene of the company can be summarized for financial planning and executive decisions. But in that case all the original stats need to be saved so that the executives can look at them anytime they want.
Penalties of low statistics should be termination and the employees should be aware of this at the beginning of their employment. They should sign a document stating that they understand this point.
Constantly inspect the actual areas and never rely ONLY on statistics as they can be forged. Use good judgement and also stats as a combo attack.
Some employees will need more than one statistic, especially the Officers of the company and above.
2. Not Having a Reports and Commendations System
Most likely you are not able to watch every single employee every single minute of the day. You need some sort of system that allows your employees to report to you what good and bad things are going on in your area so that you can act without having to constantly inspect yourself.
Businesses that have strong internal PR campaigns will REALLY benefit from a system like this. But can any small or medium company benefit from something like this?
Of course! The main reason why is because sometimes multiple people will report the same person; that’s a dead giveaway.
You also need to know who’s doing an exceptional job, which is where the commendation system comes into play. This lets you know who you should promote.
3. Not Having Some Kind of Programs/Projects/Orders Laid Out that your Staff can See
Programs are written by management and are step-by-step guides to achieve some major goal. These are then broken down into Projects by lower management and then broken down into orders for the staff to DO. These “bridge the gap” between pie-in-the-sky dreams and reality.
For example if you wanted to expand out your marketing to bring new lots of new business, you need to get that put down in a way where management and the workers of a company can be on the same page and be in harmony. Having all of this in writing can cause massive internal PR issues and thus turmoil in your company.
Ways you could benefit from having these openly published and known:
You want to set up real-time target attainment systems
In order to set up a real-time system so that key people in your company can see how the motion is going and what problems there are currently in order to get plans back on track
So that employees can know where the major decisions of the company are coming from and what they overall plan is without a ton of meetings and internal PR events
4. Not Having Some Sort of Target Attainment System In-Place
We’ve all had those situations in the workplace where a person was promoted because they had a slightly worse golf swing or because they were pretty and made the boss laugh. But would you trust the future of your company on a political or social ability?
I hope not, because that’s what it is. Your company making money effectively is the only way you’re ever going to get paid as a HR professional and as an entrepreneur it’s the only way you’re ever going to move your company in the right direction.
This is why you could use a target attainment system. Target attainment allows you to promote people for efficiency ONLY. Not for any other reason. Which is critical because the entire group depends only on the ability of everyone else in the group to do their job.
A person needs to be able to finish certain actions in a certain amount of time. They need to be rewarded when they do and disciplined or helped when they don’t.
Someone could say that’s a little like training a dog, but this particular part of HR is a bit like that. Some people may complain, but the ones who do, do so because they know they don’t have the ability to produce properly so they try to break you down by saying the system doesn’t work or that it’s strange and degrading.
Why not use all these tools together and leverage your staff? They can be the best asset or the biggest burden. You decide.