Fri, 14 Oct 2011

Finders keepers

Finding the right people for your organisation, and retaining the best talent, ensures the health and well-being of your company and the bottom line.

Finding the right people for your organisation, and retaining the best talent, is vital to the health and well-being of your company and will undoubtedly affect the bottom line. The effective use of workforce management tools can help.

Incentive schemes and recognition are an important part of the reward mix in any company. In fact, a company that uses them will undoubtedly
see a return on its bottom line, according to Adrian Duncan, business development director at employee benefits com pany P&MM.

The business case is strong, but how such schemes are planned and delivered will have a significant impact on their ultimate effectiveness.

Most companies deploy some sort of employee recognition scheme; however, some are ill-thought through and poorly executed, and so their impact
is diminished. P&MM, which advises businesses on how to best deploy motivational programmes, believes that creating a culture in which an individual’s efforts are recognised and rewarded will in turn have an impact on business performance. But measuring their impact with a proper methodology will also help the company develop its business.

Duncan says that any employer can put in place a reward and recognition programme. ‘_Some managers will give employees a voucher for a meal down the road. But an agency will give you different methodologies,’_ he says. By undertaking a formal scheme with a scientific approach, he says an external company with good research method skills will help get the best from a scheme and identify objectives.

The motivation for setting employee engagement goals varies between employers; in some cases it might be to improve the customer experience, or it could be inspired by increasing sales or for internal reasons – such as to reduce employee absence rates. As long as there is a clear objective,
an employee benefits company or internal staff can monitor and measure progress.

Rewards scheme
John Sylvester, executive director at P&MM, believes it is not only employees who must sell their attributes. In a competitive job market the employer must also show how it intends to look after employees. ‘It is important to stand out from the crowd as an employer of choice. Creating an incentive scheme as part of the employment proposition, which when benchmarked against competitors offers rewards that will be envied, is one way of doing this,’ he says.

Matt Wheeler, product and marketing director at time and attendance solutions company Amano UK, agrees: ‘To ensure they are able to attract and keep the cream of the crop, businesses must respond to the needs of the employee and optimise job satisfaction.’ But today’s modern employee is more demanding. It is not only monetary benefits that will retain staff, and companies need to think more laterally. Wheeler says: ‘To achieve good talent management, it’s important for employers to move away from a rigid view of how and when people work effectively. A greater work-life balance and the freedom of flexible working are no longer considered tempting bonuses, but are now real priorities for the modern worker. Research even suggests that staff value flexible working more than pay rises. By enabling remote and flexible working schedules, businesses will also be able to tap into a larger geographic pool of talent and employees can be liberated from the tight restraints of nine-to-five schedules.’

Without flexibility, a demotivated workforce will (un)happily ensue, and this can have a staggering impact if examining a national picture. The cost of absence to the UK employer was estimated by CBI/Pfizer in its 2010 survey, The path to recovery: Absence and workplace health, at £17bn. It revealed that each employee averaged 6.4 absence days per year – a direct cost of £595 per employee.

Perhaps the employer approach needs some rethinking. For example, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development research says 41% of employers monitor absenteeism closely but fail to put in place a contingency plan to address this.

Motivating staff
Wheeler argues that it isn’t just motivational programmes which help companies monitor their businesses productivity; just as important are time and attendance solutions. ‘To keep an eye on productivity levels, time and attendance systems can provide crucial statistics on productive and non-productive time. ‘In addition to standard absence data, employers can monitor data on employee lateness and sick days. By building time and attendance technology to cater to the individual needs of a business, ensuring better planning, shift management and staff deployment to cope with unexpected or multiple staff absence, overtime costs and wastage can be reduced considerably,’ explains Wheeler.

Nevertheless, he concedes there are some undeniable benefits to embracing motivational techniques. ‘Productivity improves within a motivated workforce, and this can be measured via output. Increased staff motivation also leads to a reduction in absenteeism rates – a true cost and drain on company resources.’

Ensuring maximum profit on a company’s bottom line is key, and for those who take responsibility for this it’s a long journey. The best advice is to take your employees with you, rather than expecting them to blindly follow.