Finding the right skills
One of the most specific People challenges I come across is where businesses feel they can’t find new employees with the right skills for their particular roles.
I’ve seen this problem in businesses as diverse as manufacturing, landscaping and IT services and whilst there’s no magic bullet, there are 7 things you can do to reduce the size or impact of the problem.
- Be the best local employer – and make it visible.
- Continual recruitment
- Entry level jobs
- Make sure everyone already employed is working at their highest possible skill level
- Well documented and trained out processes
- Multi skilled workforce
- Training and development planning
1. Be the best local employer – and make it visible.
Why would highly skilled people come to work for you and not for someone else? If you can’t answer that question, this is the place to start. And as a rule it’s not normally about pay rates. Your pay needs to be competitive but not significantly higher than other workplaces. Good people will gravitate to companies that treat them well and make them feel good about their work and their involvement in the organisation.
Once you’ve made your company the best place to work, how will people know? It can’t just be through job ads – after all, who’s going to believe the hype when you’re trying to sell them the role? Many businesses pride themselves on the reputation they have in the marketplace with customers – now it’s time to replicate that in the marketplace for employees.
2. Continual recruitment
However you recruit, you can continue your recruitment activity even when you have no specific vacancies to fill. How good would it feel to know that there are 5 or 10 people waiting to come and work for you when a vacancy arises? I speak to a lot of companies who tell me their growth plans are on hold because they can’t get the staff. Also that there’s so much opportunity they can’t take advantage of because of lack of skilled employees. If you recruit continually, this will become a spur to growth rather than a constraint. And this only needs to be for one or two specific roles in most businesses – what are your bottleneck roles?
3. Entry level jobs
This one’s a longer term strategy but again, with most businesses, an apprentice or younger worker looking to gain skills can make a significant difference to your team within 2 or 3 years. That may seem a long way off right now but once you start, the time goes very quickly and if you’d started this 2 years ago, you’d be in a very different place right now. This strategy works well with No 4 – getting everyone working at their greatest skill level.
4. Make sure everyone is working at their highest possible skill level
A lot of employees have varied task lists. Investigate what your team are actually doing – in most businesses people only work at their highest skill level for 20-30% of their time (this includes you as the owner by the way). The rest of their time is filled with work that doesn’t require their level of skill. If you can identify this work, you can cascade it to the next level in the skills hierarchy. This will have 2 effects, it will free up the highest skill levels to do more of their best work and it will challenge the next skill level down to become better by doing the work they perceive as belonging to the higher skill level. At some point, there will be a list of tasks falling out of the cascade that on-one has the time to do, but these will be the ones requiring the lowest skill level and now you can go and find your next apprentice / administrator / office junior to do those tasks which is a lot easier and cheaper than finding more resource at the highest skill levels.
5. Well documented and trained out processes
Ask yourself the question – do I need a highly skilled employee because the job requires that skill level or am I compensating for a lack of systems and processes. In many cases, a lack of process requires people to tailor make every customer experience, to troubleshoot every delivery and to use their initiative to deliver a great outcome. If you had a robust process for delivering whatever it is you do in a consistently great way without someone having to reinvent the magic every time, could that role be done by someone with a lower skillset?
6. Multi Skilled Workforce
This one is suitable for organisations that have varying demands on 3 or more different products, services or process lines. I first came across the idea in a manufacturing environment 25 years ago where we moved from prizing specialist machine operators who were outstanding at running one type of machine but could not be deployed to other areas of the factory. What if that machine operator was trained to run 3 or 4 different types of machine? Would they be worth more to the organisation as demand fluctuated across the different product types? What about the crewing flexibility this would give you? The added value to the organisation allows you to reward your multiskilled people for becoming so valuable too. I’ve now seen this concept work really well across service sector businesses, site work organisations and organisations delivering care and support. The broader the skill base of your employees the more flexible your organisation and the less likely you are to suffer when demand mix changes or people move on.
7. Training and development planning
Take your most skilled or least well resourced role at the moment (this might include your own). What does your 3 year business plan and organisation chart tell you you’ll need in 1, 2 or 3 years’ time? Once you know the roles you’ll need to fill and the number of people you’ll need to fill them, you can build a training and development plan around those roles. If you start growing your own future star employees right now, you’ll be able to combine all of these 7 principles into one cohesive plan that means you’ll not suffer from a skills shortage again. And what if you were the only company of your type to do this in the next 3 years? How great a competitive advantage would that give you?
We work with business owners and MD’s to help them get clarity on these points and more. If you’re struggling with where to start why not schedule a conversation with us? It’s free and at the very least you’ll come away with a couple of ideas to help you move forward.
Arrange a call at a time to suit you here.
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