Asking new questions can help
Many private business owners are expressing frustration in terms of finding and retaining talented and engaged workers. This frustration relates to finding new people to support growth and retaining those they’ve invested in their training.
To protect and even build the value or net worth of your company, it obviously takes having the right people, in the right roles with the right focus. Our guidance to business owners who are struggling with labor is to ask new question to generate fresh dialog with your team that might trigger changes you could make to help address the labor challenge:
- Do we truly understand the root cause of employees leaving? Are they expressing pay is the issue or are there other reasons they don’t feel comfortable sharing with us?
- If retention is our challenge, are we losing the newer employees or are we losing those with 2 or more years of service? If it’s the newer employees, is our new employee onboarding serving us well?
- Do we see the labor challenge across our organization or is it in select areas only?
- Do we see certain managers or supervisors struggling more than others with loss of employees? Might managers or supervisors be lacking good managerial/leadership skills and that is frustrating employees?
- Can we redeploy any employees to move them temporarily to critical areas where labor has been a problem? This may mean making a sacrifice in another area of the business but it may be worthwhile at least for an interim period of time. And this could be your opportunity to increase cross training which will help the business long term.
- When is the last time we reviewed our major workflow processes to determine the most labor intensive ones and identify potential improvements we could make to drive productivity gains? Many processes were designed years ago, are they efficient or are we having to apply labor to outdated processes?
- Are we monitoring available technologies that could help us rethink how certain job functions or processes get done?
- Are we offering spiffs to existing employees if they recommend new employees?
- Are we leveraging local groups that could help us engage with individuals with special needs but they are very capable of performing some jobs we have labor shortages in?
View this as more than a tactical issue. View it as a strategic opportunity to ask new questions about your business. Getting innovative in labor planning, recruiting and retention is critical to protecting and building your long term company net worth.
