The Current Top 5 People Problems Facing Employers Right Now:
1. The Furlough Divide
2. Remote Engagement
3. Restructuring
4. Top Grading
5. Resource Planning
1. The Furlough Divide:
Through no fault of their own, many people were placed on furlough between March and June, a large proportion are still awaiting their return to work.
At the same time, many businesses ran a skeleton crew, who picked up a heavier workload and burden of responsibility, often with little or no time off to recharge their batteries.
Now, as the Job Retention Scheme draws to a close, resentment can find a place in both camps.
In the furloughed camp, concerns are centred on being laid off, self-worth, reduced earnings and fear of redundancy.
Those employees who kept the business running may now feel like they have carried the burden of their colleagues and exhaustion is setting in.
Avoiding this gap requires sensitivity and careful management, such as:
- Ensure non furloughed employees have the opportunity to take a break and be relieved by their returning colleagues.
- Re- on boarding furloughed colleagues to introduce them to new working practices and cultural changes to meet the new demands of the current climate.
- Ask your employees to share their stories and allow each other to appreciate each other’s experience and perspective.
It helps if you have a strong culture, where colleagues feel comfortable being vulnerable and honest without reprisal.
2. Remote Engagement:
As we return to working from home where possible, keeping people anchored to your business and maintaining your corporate culture at arm’s length is beginning to present a long term challenge.
Proven ways to keep remote teams connected to your culture include:
2.1 Frequency, regularity and diversity of communication variety such as:
- Daily team Zoom check-ins at the beginning and end of every day.
- Weekly 1-2-1 welfare conversations
- Monthly planning and review meetings
- Quarterly appraisals and Personal Development Planning
2.2. Understand your people
Get to know what makes your team tick by understanding their motivational drivers and what prompts the emotions which can affect performance, both positive and negative, such as desire, fear, purpose, knowledge and recognition.
Euro Projects Recruitment has partnered with leading International Employee Engagement and Motivational Mapping experts at Cassandra Andrews Ltd. to provide you with an exclusive discounted consulting package to map team members and create a bespoke motivational strategy.
2.3 Create a Sense of belonging:
- Send hand written letters to the homes of team members to praise their efforts and recognise their contributions and success.
- Involve team members in recognition competitions such as “Players Player” awards where they can recognise the contribution of fellow colleagues.
- Hold non work related events online such a general catch up, quiz or other online team events.
3. Restructuring:
Have you ever heard the story of the boiling frog?
It goes along the lines of, if you throw a frog into a pan of boiling water, it jumps straight back out again, but if you place it in cold water and slowly turn up the temperature it doesn’t realise what is happening and boils to death (please don’t try this at home!)
The effects of the Covid-19 crisis on our businesses awoke many business leaders to the reality they had been slowly ’boiling’ away their profits with inefficient structures and behaviours.
With little choice but to change and survive, restructuring has required businesses to down-size, place people on new contracts, make redundancies, retrain and redeploy some existing people into new roles, many of which, such as digital marketing , didn’t even exist within the business 6 months ago.
The Jim Collins quote about “making sure you have the right people on the bus and sat in the right seats” has never been more relevant.
4. Top Grading
I have seen brave leaders make difficult decisions to keep their business alive in the past 6 months, including top grading their teams.
Warren Buffet said, “It’s not until the tide goes out you can see who has been swimming naked”. The crisis exposed sales people who only took orders, finance people who couldn’t produce the forecasts required to raise funds and HR people unable to make redundancies.
Your business is only as strong as its weakest link and many leaders are now forced to replace people who can deliver what is necessary in these difficult and uncertain times.
Pivoting into new markets to diversify is also a key driver of recruitment right now, with many businesses looking for new markets for existing products and capacity, or changing what they do entirely.
5. Resource Planning
Current spare capacity versus an uncertain economic outlook is a major dilemma for many businesses, however the majority of businesses I speak to are experiencing a rapid recovery to pre-Covid levels.
There is however a large amount of financial support and new money in circulation and due to large scale lay-offs in certain sectors there are currently more skills.
As in previous downturns, the long term winners are those businesses making the most of the apparent abundance of these resources.
What kind of leader are you?
Find out by joining the Euro Projects Recruitment Business Leaders Zoom Call; this is a free call we have been running every week since 23rd March to help business leaders like you to navigate the ever changing and turbulent eaters of the current climate.
At 2.00pm on the 12th October, we will be joined by Steve Middleton from Engagement Multiplier to share their findings on the leadership characteristics proving successful in the face of adversity.
I will also share my observations of the employment market and Helen Dyke, Employment Law Partner at Irwin Mitchell will share the latest legal updates around the Job Retention & Support schemes and Covid-19.
“This is one call I simply cannot afford to miss” – Jane, HR Director
We look forward to seeing you on the call:
Please join us:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81612673124?pwd=V2FPY2lBcUtUWlFnUXlKMG5mSWwvUT09
Meeting ID: 816 1267 3124
Passcode: 296598