A recent US survey from Kantata indicates that 53% of leaders are having trouble hiring full-time employees and are spending 40% of their day dealing with employee turnover.
FORTY PERCENT!
We’ve been here before. Markets expand and contract. Layoffs have already begun in some areas. In the meantime, the labor pool is not going to magically improve (it’s a demographic issue!). We need creative ideas to solve chronic problems.
The problem is we often use common approaches to solutions. For example, Kurt Lewin’s Force Field Analysis offers a great starting point for identifying the driving and opposing forces for achieving a goal (with the power of each force rated 1-low to 4-high). Adding them up gives you a sense of your probability of success. But it’s not the right angle…
For the ‘problem of recruiting, what can we add to the driving forces to increase your odds of success? We end up with some decent ideas:
Increase Attraction
- Enhance public storytelling about your purpose
- Develop internal referral programs and extend them to families, friends, and other external parties
- Make internal development programs available externally (think about it!)
- Offer free mentoring sessions for potential candidates
- Give rejected candidates such a great experience that they encourage others to apply
- Consider labor pools that no one else is considering
Reduce attrition
- Preempt exits with regular “staying interviews”
- Proactively discuss flight risks with your team
- Invest in employee development EVERY WEEK
- Exit people so gracefully that they will offer backfill referrals
- Increase access to leadership
- Crank up positive reinforcement
Good stuff, right? NO! This is what everyone else is doing.
Instead, start by considering whether you are trying to solve the right problem. Maybe you should stop hiring!
What is the ultimate objective? Take a moment to consider what we are trying to accomplish. Whether your focus is customer responsiveness, supply chain security, or government reporting, hiring might not be necessary. With the end in mind, ask:
Can I Meet the Goal Differently?
- Consider how a high potential employee can expand into the required role
- Determine the cost of doing nothing (not hiring) on the company’s strategy
- Determine whether the role is really required to meet the need
- Ruthlessly hunt down and abolish non-value-add tasks
- Move low skill but necessary work from critical resources to cheaper resources
- Cancel time-wasting meetings
- Streamline and automate work no one wants to do – consider hiring a robot (not joking!)
- Outsource functions that are not unique to your business
- Sell a line of business that you are unable to staff
- Ask your team how to blow up processes to accelerate production/work
- Stop rewarding the “lifesaving firefighters” and start rewarding those with excellent planning and prioritization skills that avoid fires in the first place
No one can spend 40% of their time on employee turnover. There are other ways to meet business needs. We all have tough issues ahead of us. It could be time to go another way.
If you’re looking for innovative approaches to tough problems, drop me a line. Every team can benefit from an outside perspective.
Thoughtfully yours,
Jeff Skipper
