Maximizing The Power Of Your Workforce With Strategic Planning

February 24, 2020 at 10:33 AM by Team Entelo

Untitled design (31)As businesses work to plant themselves firmly in their given industry, strategic choices must be made to grow roots in a particular market. A company may have the best product in the industry, but without a strong workforce, it’s likely that company won’t succeed. With the right strategic planning, companies can maximize their workforce and deliver consistent results. 

One of the most important things to consider when optimizing your workforce is the people that make up your team. By finding strong team members right out of the gate, the ability to hone that talent for your particular business will be easier, faster, and more effective. Once you have a great team, provide them with the tools they need for success, like software that is easy to use, but highly effective. Allow your employees flexibility in their work environment by using communication tools that are natural to them—encouraging a culture of open discussion in the workplace. These tools, in line with a positive working environment, will reduce workplace stress and maintain a healthy and productive workplace for your employees and company to thrive. 

 

Resumes and AI: Get the Right People First

The Cloud

One of the most important strategic choices you can make for your business is to upgrade your hiring process to the 21st century. Potential candidates have moved way beyond sending paper cover letters and resumes through the mail, and your company should, too. Just the ability to send a resume in the cloud and update it on LinkedIn are major advances in recruiting that are often taken for granted. Growing businesses and established businesses alike need to embrace the future of recruiting or they will surely lose great candidates. Job seekers aren’t going to take the time to mail their resume and cover letter when they’ve already applied to twenty jobs through the cloud in the time it would take to walk a block over to a collection box.

Automated Resume Sorting with Machine Learning

Now that you’ve upgraded to the cloud for sourcing new candidates, it’s time to upgrade your resume sorting process, too. It’s much easier to weed the garden with a spade than your bare hands. Cut down on time to hire with AI-enabled resume scanning. If your business doesn't have the capability to set up its own resume sorting system, finding the right recruitment software with machine learning capabilities can help you source candidates based on work history and other insights. Not only will your hiring team thank you for saving them countless hours, but by bringing the right candidates to the front first, you will find better people faster. When you choose candidates that will quickly become proficient, you will save money on both your hiring process and onboarding process. When you hire the right candidate from the start, the chances your business will retain them increases as well.

Now that you have a great workforce clicking away at keyboards and brainstorming new marketing ideas, it’s time again to grow. With your up-to-date hiring process, predictive analytics allow your business to find correlations between already successful employees, making it easy to predict what a potentially successful candidate’s resume will look like. This is when machine learning truly fosters a great workforce for your business. As you hire more and more successful candidates and collect data on what makes them great employees, predictive analytics will continuously and exponentially increase the power and potential of your team. 

Personality Tests and AI

Another way to vet candidates before bringing them onto the team is a personality test. A lot of companies are using this method to find the right fit for new hires before onboarding them. This is an excellent way to find out if potential candidates will mesh well in your company culture and put them on the right team for success from the start. 

The problem with typical personality tests are that they’re easy to manipulate. This method is only successful if the results are accurate and a candidate’s personality is measured honestly. New technology is emerging to use artificial intelligence in personality tests, tracking eye movement to measure personality, rather than only scoring the actual questions. Researchers at Macquarie, CSIRO and the University of Sydney have made impressive strides in creating an incredibly accurate personality test. By tracking people’s bodily responses instead of simply assessing the answers given on a personality test, researchers have found that just tracking pupil dilation resulted in 86% accuracy. Even more illuminating, tracking skin conductivity and pulse brought the results above 90% accuracy. 

The implications for this technology to be used in recruiting are limitless. Not only can businesses know what kind of people they’re hiring from the beginning, but they can also make better decisions about where to place new hires on their team. Companies could predict what coworkers new hires will work well with and what projects they’ll enjoy. This will elevate employee engagement and move new hires from the training phase to profitable much faster. By ensuring new hires will be happy in their assignment, the likeliness of retention will increase as well. 

Free up HR, Administrators, and Managers with HCM

By using human capital software (HCM) to automate time and labor tracking as well as time-off requests, your team will have more time to spend on tasks better left to humans, like building a positive company culture and understanding employee’s strengths and weaknesses. Employees can utilize a virtual agent to locate information of benefits, request time off, and even submit expenses. Employees can use the software to procure office supplies from third parties, too. By reducing requests to administrators, they can spend more time making the workplace a more productive environment by improving organization and fluidity of processes. 

It’s easy to increase productivity by providing employees with a central repository for benefits, project management, time and labor, and much more. By training employees on one platform, they can be more focused on their work, rather than sorting through several platforms to accomplish a single task. Using an HCM system makes work easily accessible from any location, and in turn, your business can reduce workplace stress and promote employee wellness by offering remote capabilities and flexible working hours.

 

Create Flexible and Ubiquitous Communication Among Coworkers

Communication is one of the most important aspects of a healthy workplace. Communication in the workplace is something often overlooked, costing the average business a staggering $62.4 million dollars per year. Allow employees to communicate through tablets, mobile devices, and computers for effective, continuously collaborative communication. 

This will help to promote a culture of open communication and encourage workers to speak freely about their work conditions or ideas on a certain project. Managers should invite feedback on what strategies employees think are working and which are not, and they should actually listen to them. Apps like Slack and Google Chat allow for this level of open communication among coworkers. This will increase productivity, generate new ideas, and create an environment of strategic planning within your organization. 

When it comes to performance evaluations, managers and employees alike will be more prepared and willing to speak about the things that worked and the things that need improvement. By making these evaluations more like conversations, rather than going down the list and checking off boxes, employees are more likely to benefit from the evaluation. By embracing a culture of open communication, employees are more likely to provide honest feedback to their managers. This will help determine skill gaps and where training was missed. Managers shouldn’t be tempted to blame employees for a lack of understanding before first evaluating the training program and determining where the employer may be at fault. A culture of open communication will help prevent misunderstandings, improve your training process, and increase awareness for potential problems in your day-to-day workflow. 

In Summary

There are a lot of ways to maximize your workforce with strategic planning, and we’ve covered a few with the potential to have an impact on your company as a whole. With great communication, a centralized system for maintaining employee workflow, and, possibly the most important, getting the right people first, your workforce is sure to be at its best. 

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