We live in an age where turnover of staff is one of the most common and frustrating experiences a business can face. It is an age of fleet-footed employees having their heads turned incessantly by mobile job postings, hearts un-bound by the need for life-long loyalty to a company, and a dynamic that relies more than ever on the need for strong cultural values within the business to retain and acquire new talent. The battle for the hearts and minds of employees is essential; highlighted this week in a survey in the UK of 8,750 businesses as well as data from the Office for National Statistics has found that poor quality people management ‘costs employers £84 billion a year’.
Motivating employees is an age old puzzle and ambition for managers; one that has stalked the brainstorm splattered whiteboards of boardrooms. Yet the first question that must be asked by businesses is not how to motivate, but who to motivate. In this instance, as the survey also revealed, one of the most important workforce demographics to keep motivated is the management team.
Ensuring your management team is motivated and have the resources they need available to them is essential for a number of reasons. Firstly, the management team is often the living embodiment of the cultural values of your business; it is they that will teach new employees new skills, and it is they that will ensure that your working practices remain aligned with these values. You must ensure that you are equipping your management team with the necessary tools and resources to ensure they are constantly learning and interacting with the values of your business.
Businesses can often forget about their management teams once they become accustomed to them, creating a climate of learning lethargy. So by ensuring that your management team have the necessary tools to improve their own learning and development will improve both their performance and your ability to retain them. This has the additional yet crucial benefit of teaching them how to manage their own team effectively. While many employees become managers because of either their proficiency at the practical job requirements – this does not necessarily translate into people management skills. Where relevant, this shortcoming can be addressed through training, so that they feel suitably motivated an capable to train those working underneath them.
Meeting the above learning and development demands is something that can be done through the use of Talent Management software, ensuring that management can be provided with a continuous level of training and feedback that continues to validate and elevate their position and teach them new skills. The merit of training software is not only in providing training but identifying areas in which training is needed in the first place.
Ensuring that your management team is not only motivated but able to train your employees effectively is essential. Your management team must be aware that any development must be not only for their own benefit but for the whole business. Businesses must not wait for the heads and hearts of employees to drop before implementing these programs, they must make it an ongoing procedure from when they first walk through the door to when they sit at the head of the boardroom table.
