Workforce Change, How Has It Affected Your Company?

Workforce Change, How Has It Affected Your Company?

COVID has changed the workforce in so many ways. Business closures, both temporary and permanent, have disrupted business owners and individual careers. Working remotely has changed the corporate environment for both employees and customers. Even as we get back to some semblance of normal, the way we do business has been altered forever.

Not all employees can work remotely though. More businesses are reopening and need their employees to come back to work. For lower wage workers, this is a dilemma. Many of them were making more money on unemployment than they can with their employer’s current budget. With businesses open less hours and operating at less capacity, employers are likely to have less money for wages. This means some employee’s hours will be cut with lower hourly wage and less tips.

Experiencing workforce change

Even if your company has more high paid positions, you may still experience employees moving on. With our current situation, many companies assume that their staff will stay put for security. But many employees no longer fear changing jobs will hurt their career. In fact, they may find that changing jobs is the best (or only) way to increase their pay and title. There are some industries where there is a shortage of skilled workers and this puts a real strain on those companies.

Aside from the cost of recruiting and training a new employee, the disruption to your business and your customers adds to your loss. And any disruption to customer service because of missing staff or inexperienced new employees can make it harder to retain your clients.

But overall, a big reason employees leave a company is feeling disengaged. If you want to keep your valuable workforce, help them keep their passion and motivation. It is in your best interest to help your staff stay invested in your company’s success by keeping them engaged.

Whether you have minimum wage workers or higher-level skilled employees, don’t let workforce change keep you from thriving and accomplishing your company’s mission.

Practice good communication with your direct reports – Regular conversations will go a long way to keep them engaged. Keeping your workforce change in mind, include your staff in the loop on how their contributions affect the company and will help them stay focused on your business goals.

Provide clear expectations and written goals – Employees that understand what is expected, the timelines, and how success will be measured are more prepared to perform well in their jobs.

Give timely feedback

Annual reviews have their purpose, but continuous feedback can be much more effective in correcting problems, rewarding successes, and providing encouragement. Especially with so much workforce change, take advantage of addressing what is going on right now to optimize opportunities to improve immediately instead of waiting 6 months or longer for the annual review.

• Coach instead of dictating – Coaching your direct reports has a huge advantage over just giving orders. Coaching can help employees to learn how to be more proactive and problem solving instead of always depending on their managers to direct their every move. Managers’ time is better spent teaching their direct reports to be more self-sufficient and employees feel more respected and able to grow in their job.
• Check on engagement – It’s always a good idea to find ways to check on workforce engagement. Surveying your employees with a short questionaire can bring you some surprising information – especially if you structure it in a way that you can see which managers are getting the best feedback. Any time you have a manager that gets good feedback and has a good rate of retention of employees, it is time to see if you can replicate what that manager is doing to accomplish that goal company-wide.
• Helping your employees feel that their work has value and contributes to the success of your company goes a long way to keeping their skills and experience in your company.
• In addition to using best HR practices, Genesis Background Screening always suggests a thorough pre-employment background screening to help you make an informed decision.