Did You Draft A Good Team?

How many of you watched the NFL draft yesterday?

If you missed it, you also missed out on a great Human Resources lesson; do you know what that was? You must strengthen the weakest links in your Human Resources Chain to make sure your entire Team wins. Each Team that drafted yesterday asked the same question, round after round; whom is available in the marketplace (on a team or not) to fill our gaps, which our Team needs to win the next Super Bowl. Each Team’s need is different, but their goal is not; how do we build a better Team. They do that by not being satisfied with their current Human Resources in place now and in the future, they are always looking to change this and that to make the right HR formula for their success.

The Human Resource department should never stop looking to “trade-up” on associate talent and reposition others for greater utilization within your business unit, and one successful way to achieve this is by having a full pipeline of candidates.

One way on the HR front is to have candidates (current and non-current associates) in a hiring pipeline for those soon-to-be-open/heavy-turnover-rated positions, ready to move through the HR pipeline to fill the void left by “something” happening to one of your “starters (associates).”

Remember, an HR pipeline is similar to a sales pipeline. An HR pipeline does not always mean that you have to retain someone on payroll, just in case. It can also refer to identifying someone who you can call upon to fill that HR vacancy within a short span of time and with as little disruption to the business unit as possible (in-house or not); a good database of resume’s never hurt any business! As with all pipeline process approaches, you must continuously be filling the opening of the pipeline with excess amounts of potential candidates so that the end-result of this ever-moving, constricting pipeline is a successful transition between a new and old associate for those upcoming, voided positions.

Now go win your Super Bowl!


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Managing Associate Performance For Your Small Business Success!

How do you manage associate performance? Just like you would manage driving a car. You need to know where you are at the start, where you want to be at the end, and a roadmap to help optimize the distance from point A to point B and receive some redirection in case you are off the path.

Managing associate performance can be in the form of written documentation for reporting the results, personal follow-up/open dialogue with that associate, constructive feedback, timely reviews, accurate assessments, direct and specific directional action tasks that have been accomplished, and what needs to be accomplished for future goal platforms.

Along with these items, you need assessment tools that determine upward mobility capabilities and strategic skills currently in place or underdeveloped ones needing attention, placement within current and ongoing organizational charts, open dialogue with direct supervisors, customer satisfaction scores (if applicable), and financial performance metrics (if applicable). By combining the information and resources above, you know where the associate is and where he wants to end up, so you are giving the associate a “roadmap” on how to get there, and he can now “drive” his own career achievement by daily, hands-on deliverance within the business unit’s success structure.

Each associate has a different want and need from a workplace environment, but by assisting each to accomplish his end results by managing his performance from the very first day of employment to the end, both the associate and business unit will see the most productive outcome. Only when a business unit focuses on managing associate performance through each associate as an individual part of the whole and manages career path/performance to those individualities; can the sum of all associates’ efforts be combined into one goal for the achievement of the entire organization.

Start managing associate performance and doing the reporting on it today, because we are all connected and dependent on one another. Your success depends on other associate’s within your business unit, and managing associate performance is one way to guide that success in the right direction. Remember, “We win as one!”

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Labor Efficiency Modeling For Your Small Business Success

Getting yourself and your business unit into the mind-set of thinking about labor efficiency modeling is one of the keys to running a profitable business.

The last time you looked at your current standards was when? Do you know what the correct production efficiency from each of your job codes is, even yours? What is your monitoring frequency? Are your current efficiency modeling standards relative and timely with the current work force, market conditions, pricing structure, technology, and machinery in place? When do unacceptable results on each end of the parameter’s spectrum trigger that an adjustment needs be made?

Do you share your statistical results from the modeling output calculation with the associates, HR, and supervisors for constructive assimilation and benchmark performance managing? You cannot tell someone to do better at something if you cannot show them why and where they are not meeting standards. Are you making labor efficiency part of the corporate culture and driving performance, retention, rewards, and career paths with them? Is your monitoring on efficiency placed upon the greatest job code that will yield the highest returns? Can your associates deliver upon current standards without task saturation overcoming them and quality being affected?

All of the answers to these above questions and more, along with revenue and greater efficiency, can be generated when you apply labor efficiency modeling to your business unit. Always focus your labor efficiency modeling to the greatest payroll burden and work backward throughout your business unit as you are re-implementing your standards.

How do hotels use labor efficiency? One way is in the form of cleaning rooms, the “minutes per room” or M.P.R. that it takes a room attendant to clean a room. At the end of that workday, all of the time from a room attendant is added up and then verified that it fits within the “minutes per room” standards for all of the rooms that were assigned to them for cleaning. When these numbers are reviewed, deviations can be determined that very day, so corrective action can be taken to balance out the week’s labor efficiency model before the overages hit a profit and loss statement. Labor costs on cleaning rooms can greatly impact the bottom line of a hotel, so that is why daily monitoring of this labor cost component (labor efficiency) helps a hotel bring down the appropriate payroll percentages and budget adherence is achieved.

Labor efficiency modeling can bring great success to your business unit if implemented successfully. What are yours and how are you going to make them better?

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Stop Pushing Yourself Making Your Small Business A Success

Instead, start utilizing your time more wisely.

We are all spacers of time, to some degree. If we were given one hour to do a specific task or job, probability could tell us that we would do that task or job correctly in just fifty-five minutes, with no reduction in quality. If this five-minute savings is true, imagine if you add up those five minutes that you just saved and multiply it by eight hours in your workday. That equals forty minutes more in a workday to become more productive.

Say you then took those forty minutes in a working day and multiplied it by five days in a workweek, which would be two hundred minutes a workweek, or three hours and twenty minutes. If we take those two hundred minutes a workweek and multiply it by fifty work weeks a year, that would equal ten thousand minutes or 166 hours and forty minutes a year of greater productivity by utilizing your time more wisely by not spacing your tasks. If you then took 166 hours and forty minutes and divided it by forty hours in a workweek, you would get 4.17 workweeks, or about one month more of time in a year for more available, more productive time available.

All you have to do for this “extra” time is stop spacing your tasks and pushing yourself and instead start utilizing your time more wisely. Worst case scenario, what could you do with two more weeks of work accomplished a year? How much more of a success could you be in your position, both financially and status-wise?

But be careful. Do not try to lower your efficiency ratio too much, or you will burn out and hit a wall of reduced results. Instead, focus on each task until the goal is completed the right way and in a timely manner, without spacing involved. Only then will you find under each task some piece of time that came from having your efficiency higher, not your pushing of those efforts, thus producing your extra “time of success.”

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Correctly On-boarding New Associates For Your Small Business

What is one of the fastest ways to increase HR expenses and create workflow stoppages? On-boarding new associates incorrectly and not having enough candidates in your HR pipeline, that’s how. “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” The precedent is set on the very first day of a new hire’s career with your business unit. Whether they are digging ditches or filling out paperwork and watching EEOC videos, the company’s professionalism, operating procedures, the employer’s commitment to its associates, and the overall workplace experience is entrenched within the mind-set of that new associate within those first few weeks.

Do you have a standardized, detailed, 0-90 day on-boarding action plan in place with performance metrics and benchmark accomplishments for correctly evaluating the progression of all new associates and transitioning them into long-term team members? Do you throw new hires to the “sharks” or provide support platforms to them in the form of training (all media and hands-on types), coaching, mentoring, monitoring, corrective actions for redirecting, S.O.P.s, support (technical and non-technical), and progress measurement indicators?

Go look at the last two years of associate turnover in their first ninety days of employment with your business unit and understand the reasons why. Once you find the whys, you can identify the missing steps of the on-boarding process. After those system steps have been reorganized, look at what steps should be created for the future to produce a better on-boarding system. Why would you do that? Because, businesses will always have new hires and turnover, so this situation is not going away. In fact, as the marketplace grows tighter and tighter for good and qualified new hires, correctly on-boarding associates is a major factor in retention, lowering HR expenses, successful integration of them into the workflow, converting them into long-term associates, and productive team members for the success of all.

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