Employee Retention - Invest, Reward, Respect

The success of any budding or existing SME lies in its team of dedicated and productive employees working with it. As a management initiative, it is necessary to retain potential employees and reward them from time-to-time. A study has established that 62 per cent of SMEs face hurdles in recruiting and retaining staff over a period of time.

Invest in your employees
Often, companies invest in a wide amount of infrastructure to train their employees for better production and losing them because of a lack in retention skills can prove to be a big loss. SMEs especially need to prepare their HR processes to save themselves from losing valuable employees. Also, competitors do not hesitate in poaching potential workforce from other companies and may cause damage to the companies by offering their employees better incentives. 

Retain your employees with competitive wages

Competitive Wages
There are a number of ways in which an organization can retain their trusted employees. Paying competitive wages is one of the most important methods to hold existing employees. Also, providing your employees a reasonable amount of flexibility in their jobs can prove to be beneficial. A variety of benefits such as changes in schedule, fixed shifts, leaves for personal matters and family-supporting initiatives can also be crucial. Long-term employees need to be appreciated for their long service. Encouragement to them also proves to be a good example for other employees who realize that the company appreciates their commitments. Simple incentives such as health insurance, benefit packages could support them in making a decision to be with the original employer. It also offers the SMEs an additional advantage over the competition.

Respect your employee
Another key area in employee retention is respecting the employee and offering them space and support. Individualized work desks, promoting healthy relationships, and providing supportive trainings are some of the steps which can be taken by a company. Promoting interpersonal communication is also crucial for supporting existent and new employees. Various communication initiatives such as focus groups, attitude surveys, hotlines, etc. can help them in corresponding about their needs and requirements. A good employer must know what his employee wants. 

Make it transparent with your employee

Retention bonuses are another important step in retaining an employee. SMEs often face a lot of difficult situations such as mergers, acquisitions, financial difficulties, etc. It is vital in those times that companies release retention bonuses to support their employees and retain them. Also, it is better to release the amount over a period of time rather than pay it as a lump sum.

Managing a new hire
In worst cases, one may have to lose out on trusted employees and can benefit from new hires who would be more eager in their performance, would be cheaper to afford and can grow up to be a potential addition to the workforce. The only cons to a new hire would again be the question of reliability and standard requirements for training and nurturing which may take precious time of the employer. 

It is always difficult to find skilled workers and more so, in the times of a tough competitive market and financial meltdown. It always makes sense to retain one’s most effective workers.

Imperatives of skill development

Human resources are significant for the growth and development of SMEs and they should be managed well. It is extremely important to provide good training to employees. Every company has its own standards and so training employees is inevitable.  To save time and money, companies often tend to compromise on training of workers. It’s time to take this routine practice through a test.

Get the Industry In
Institutes are busy training people according to academia. It is time the industry steps in to tell the academia what they really require. Industries are now coming together with private universities to see how they can come together to develop a talented workforce that is employable. This has been a challenge so far and the attempts being made are few and far between.
 

Training on the Job
All leading companies train their workers because it is the single-most effective tool that has no substitute. Recruitment of the workers for white and blue collared ones is especially important and companies need to ensure that they are absorbed aptly into the company. Recruitment should be taken seriously and skilled HR capabilities should be employed to ensure right people are employed. 

Remunerating Well
People should be paid well and in accordance with their ability and skills. This not only ensures that they do a good job, it also means people stay with the company for a longer time. Of course, it is important to ensure that the person being recruited has a nice reputation and a good past record. Standards of recruitment should be high and competitive individuals should be given the right opportunities.    

What’s the Big Difference?
Say a company has sources technologically advanced machinery, but if the workers are not skilled and trained properly then the machinery would lie unproductive. So training of the employees is a must. They should go through training to hone their skills and to improve their performance. 

Human resources are the most powerful investment for any company. The workers should be managed intelligently and work should be assigned as per their capabilities. They should be encouraged to perform well for better productivity for the company and greater success for the person. Dedicated and hard working employees should be rewarded and they should be promoted with time. The training method should be interactive so that the employees can share their problems with the head. 

Unskilled workers are the biggest hurdle for the growth of a company. Therefore, they should be trained to generate more output and to meet their targets in a minimum time. The skilled work force tends to be more efficient and thus contributes in a big way to the advantage of the firm. Good workers add to the reputation of the company. It should be kept in mind that the employees who are given a healthy working environment are your biggest assets. 

Intelligent management of human resources is the key to success. A team of experienced and new workers should be engaged so that the freshers can learn. The leader should have a positive attitude to inspire workers to perform better and to the best of their ability. Adequate channelizing of resources makes it possible to reduce wastage and to raise turnover. So, skill development is crucial for the success of SMEs and a must-do for a productive tomorrow.

Expert Speak: Mr. Ajay Wahi

Recruit for productivity, not for numbers

You will reap rich dividends if you follow this learning to the hilt. A SME needs people who think out of the box, are creative, and are perfectionists. For all critical roles, you need the BEST. So, unlike in large organizations where recruitments are conducted by the dozen, I believe SMEs should recruit only the BEST for critical roles, even if that means some delays in the recruitment process. Do not fall into the trap of recruiting people just to increase staff size. Also, do not rush into recruiting people with lower than required skills just for the sake of delivering products faster. A product made by the best person, even if delayed due to late recruitment, would pose far fewer challenges than an inferior product developed fast by virtue of recruiting quickly the less-than-best person.

Invest time to hire the best

Recruiting the BEST is not easy. You need to make time and put in effort to take multiple rounds of interviews to identify the BEST to whom you will finally offer the position. So the first step is to mentally prepare yourself, your executive team, and others who will be involved in the interviewing process for a number of interviews. Without this mental preparation, you will probably rush through the interviews, and end up selecting someone out of sheer need to select a person. The chances are that such a person will not be the best! And if you don’t get the best, how will your organization become the best?

Streamlining of interview process

Next, you need to streamline the interview process. Ensure everyone is clear about who will conduct the first round interviews, who will participate in the second round, and so on. Often in SMEs, I have seen HR asking the department head what is to be done with short-listed candidates! You need to have complete company-wide clarity if you are planning to take many interviews, so that each step automatically leads to the next one, till the BEST person is selected.

Constitute crisp evaluation criteria

With the interview process set, one needs to chalk out very clearly the evaluation criteria to shortlist/select a candidate. This ensures that the company does not end up taking innumerable interviews without selecting a single candidate. I remember once we had taken over 100 interviews for a mid-level position and still had not made an offer despite a year having elapsed. At first, I was happy that so many interviews were being conducted, since that meant we were trying to hire only the best, till I actually ran through the evaluation criteria, only to be shocked to learn that no one was clear about them! The result: most candidates were short-listed at the first stage, and they were all rejected at the next stage! I then convened a meeting of the HR and various department heads and supervisors. We brainstormed to come up with clear and coherent evaluation criteria, and bang! We short-listed the right candidates and eventually made an offer to the best one.

Diverse interview panel

Depending upon the role you are recruiting for, your interview panel should be broad-based, because if so many interviews are to be conducted, and only a limited few conduct them, the panelists would be overloaded with interviewing duties. So expanding the pool from which the interview panel is chosen not only reduces the load on interviewers, but also motivates others to be good enough to be empanelled, creating a sense of pride and importance. Let’s face it: if the interview process and evaluation criteria are clear and well defined, you can conveniently delegate the interview process to lower levels of the hierarchy.

Collaborative recruitment effort

You can achieve all the above provided your leadership team and other seniors are with you on this journey to recruit the best .Get them together and ask them one question: Would they like to lead teams of many normally-skilled employees, or would they prefer fewer BEST-skilled ones so as to boost the quality of their teams? Most would choose the latter, where high earnings can be distributed among a smaller team of star performers rather than amongst a larger team of average employees. Someone said: A person is judged by the company s/he keeps. That is true for companies too.

To sum up, get the entire organization to realize that for critical roles, it is best to select only the BEST. Then, standardize the interview process, decide on key evaluation criteria, broaden the interview panel, and see interviewers take pleasure in their ability to select the BEST, rather than viewing the interviewing process as a liability.

Caution

You need to correctly identify critical roles before you can apply this learning.

It may take a few weeks to spread this vision across all levels of the organization.

Sum up

The interview process can be delegated to lower levels of the hierarchy. This would speed up the process and enhance quality of the recruit. Employees take pride in their ability to select the Best candidate(s) for the job, and have a personal interest in seeing their recruit succeed.

The contributor of this article is Mr. Ajay Wahi, author of management books like 'and the award for the BEST SME of the year goes to...' and 'Get Noticed Get Promoted'.

He can be contacted at 9810027979 or awahi2010@gmail.com

 

The Top Hiring Strategies for SMEs

For Small and Medium businesses its an imperative to hire good quality talent. But talent comes at a cost and many a times SMEs get into a strong catch 22 on how to decide, who to hire and then follow a host of questions as to what exactly should be the job profile, how will you measure if it's a service oriented work profile, what should be the best salary to offer etc.

Not many SMEs can afford to have focused HR departments to help them in properly and methodically answering all the above queries. Many Small and Medium businesses fall into the catch of hiring, "not the correct" person for a profile that they have on offer.

The top hiring strategies which SMEs must take into account and methodically leverage while hiring for critical and key positions in the organisation are:

• Set a particular time frame for your new hire to be on board

Many SMEs face this challenge where they are aware of their requirement of hiring someone, but they don't necessarily put a time frame to it. A proper timeline must be put through to ensure that they are being maintained to get new hires on board. Many a times SMEs get into this catch of waiting for just the right candidate and the right person never arrives. This also might just make the right employee which you want to hire go away because you took too long to make up your mind and hire. Many a times SMEs also are not fully prepared to hire. They might drop their plans mid-way, this impacts not just the company, but the reputation in the professional environment for the business.

• Choose your top 5 sources from where you would like to hire

As a business you must quickly narrow down to the top 5 sources from where you think you would like to hire. This can be social networks, it can also involve a recruitment company to be working for you, you can also take references from your professional circuit. You must be very clear in your approach as to which are top 5 places that will quickly get you results. This will help you manage your hiring time effectively.

• Make a clear Job Description

One issue with almost every job description given by an SME, until it is a manufacturing/ number oriented/ product unit job, i that the profile of the candidate i not done complete justice to, as many a times the job descriptions provided by the company does not sets and create the right expectations in the market. This affects the companies hiring process adversely.

• Get employer feedback

For SMEs every employee is crucial. Every new hire affects the culture of the company in one way or the other, hence it is necessary for the employer to gather critical feedback about the prospective employee from their past employers. Its not just about doing a job, it is also about being the right fit for the company culturally as well.

Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services is committed to enable SMEs with tools, tips and techniques to help them reach up the value chain and hence achieve the next level of growth. For more information on how you can create new opportunities for your business, drop in a comment to this post and we will get in touch with you!

Hire Great Talent Through facebook for Free: Branchout

Many small and medium businesses are looking at leveraging the social media to its full potential to achieve various business objectives. While businesses understand the benefits of being on the social media, they do face challenge in setting the right business objectives and hence deriving the right results from their online initiatives.

One of the biggest challenges for any SME is to recruit the right talent from across the industry. Now facebook helps you do it for free.

Use Branchout on facebook
Branchout is one of the most popular applications on facebook which people are using to connect with each other while exploring their professional networks. You can explore more from your existing network. Example, if one of your friends is working in a company where you would like to work, you can always get connected and ask for help/ connects. Similarly you can recommended and refer someone for a suitable opening which you see at branchout!

How do I use BranchOut on facebook?
Its fairly easy. All you need to do is to install the application called BranchOut on facebook. Once installed you will be redirected to the following screen:

You can either browse through all the various Jobs/ Openings which people in your network have already posted and apply to them through these networks OR you can also post a job. There are both free and paid versions of this service.

How does it help my business?

In more ways than one actually. You can not only post a job for which you are looking to recruit a suitable candidate, you can also at the same time look at various jobs posted by competitors/ industry parallels and look at how they are doing.

How can I look for Jobs in my Industry?

All you got to do is to click on the "Jobs" tab on the top and you will be re-directed to the screen as shown in the screen capture below:

How do I post a job in my network?

The best part about BranchOut is that the moment you post a Job, it automatically gets shared with your network at BranchOut and not just that other people applying to it can also share it within their networks and hence you have access to a whole new talent base which previously you did not.

Posting a job is easy. All you need to do is to click on the "Post A Job" link on the top and you will be re-directed to the following screen as shown below:

Once you are done with posting your Job posting, simply click on the review Your Listing at the bottom and post a review, you will be able to publish your job listing to your network. The application smartly helps your business to reach out to a whole new network of interested people which you would not have had a direct access to previously. Also it helps you access your existing facebook network in a manner not possible before.

Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services is committed to create new opportunities or SMEs to grow. To know more about how you can leverage the internet and new media technologies, drop in a comment to this post and our team of experts will be happy to help!

Getting the Right Talent for Your Small Business Almost for Free

Talent Acquisition is a major challenge for every business. For Small and Emerging businesses though, it poses as a major hurdle. Almost every conference that you attend or every entrepreneur/ business owner you speak with, they all voice the same concern in terms of acquiring the right talent.

But Why is Talent Acquisition Difficult - the challenges?!
Its not just about hiring people on board and increase the team size. For Small and Emerging businesses, hiring forms a critical aspect of their existence.
Its crucial for an emerging business to hire the relevant and right talent which adds real value to the organisation.

Every growing business faces different challenges, while attracting talent during different growth phases. While interacting with the leading SME's, some of the challenges we have come across are:

1. Finding employees with the similar passion for work
2. Finding employees with the right skill sets
3. Matching compensation expectations
4. Creating the right cultural fit

What Challenges are SMEs Facing With Human Resources?

Many of our partner SMEs across India have shared the challenges they have faced while hiring talent:

1. Reducing Cost of Talent Acquisition
2. Increasing Employee Retention and Engagement
3. Employee Training - making every employee a Go To Market engine for the organisation

SME Empowered - How Can You Address These Business Challenges?

• Reaching out to the right talent and Reducing Cost of Talent Acquisition

Both these business objectives can today be achieved easily and powerfully. Social Networking platforms like LinkedIn and facebook provide a fantastic opportunity for SMEs to connect with prospective employees.

There are many success stories of not only small but also large and established businesses, which are leveraging these online tools to reach out to prospective employees with powerful messages, while engaging them into the business vision and mission.

Large Companies Can Do it, But How Will You Do It?

Large companies have a strong brand recall and hence are able to attract good talent. Well yes, its true, but the trends are changing. We are seeing a shift in employment trends. There is good talent which is exploring new opportunities while working with Small and Medium businesses. This gives them the satisfaction of more responsibility while adding to their learning.

Eg: if you are an apparel retail company and are looking for people relevant to the domain, all you need to do is go to LinkedIn, and search on the top right search bar, for "Apparel Retail" and you will get all people in your immediate network and also in your extended network, relevant to the domain.

But How Am I Saving Cost?

Getting connected to a relevant individual on LinkedIn not only allows you to create a personal connect, but also explore opportunities. You are hence saving on:

1. Time
2. Money

While you are reaching out to the relevant target audience in lesser time, you are establishing a more personal connect and also, as in usual cases you may engage a recruitment agency or hiring to whom you pay the general norm of 8% of the annual salary or the first months' salary, you can now hire resources directly while cutting down on cost of talent acquisition.

On facebook, you can create a fan page of your brand/ company and start sharing interesting information and career opportunities with your organisation, which engages the target audience into your brand's conversation.

Eg: Accenture Hiring in India:

But How Do I Ensure Relevancy and Background of the Talent?

Firstly, you are getting connected to the relevant people in your targeted domain. Also you can search through the "recommendations" which a person you are targeting as your prospective employee. These recommendations are in the public domain and hence a strong check on the credentials of the talent.

To know more on solving challenges related to your Human Resources, drop in a comment to this post and our experts will answer back!!