Why are you ignoring me?

I can sell more for you, I can generate more leads for you, I can make better decisions for you, I can reduce your recruitment spend, I can increase your quality of hire, I can improve your employer brand, I can resolve issues before they arise, I have innovative ideas to boost productivity, I can increase your customer and staff retention. I am the key to maximising your company’s profitability. I can do all of this and more.

So why are you ignoring me?

Amazingly little, apart from lip service, is spent on trying to get the most from me! Given my potential and the fact that I am probably your company’s biggest expense would it not make sense to investigate positive ways to extract the maximum value from me before you invest elsewhere?

Empowering me by providing the right tools in the right environment allows me to focus on innovating and contributing to the organisations long term goals. This will lead to massive improvements in all areas of your business.

If you haven't guessed it I am your workforce and here are JUST 3 areas you can extract more value from me:

1.      Recruitment

If you are on a recruitment drive then me and my social networks are a good place to start. Eighty-six percent of working people who are in their first decade of employment will use social media to look for jobs and research employers. Social Sourcing lets you tap into the tremendous power of social networks and media to help promote your job opportunities to a vast audience of potential candidates.

If I have 500 social media connections and each of my connections have 500 connections that’s an untapped talent pool of up to 250,000 potential candidates from just my network. If I was good enough to make the cut chances are I probably know some people who are also good enough to work for your company.

Encourage me to talk about our company on social media, and to share my positive work experiences. Finally, when there is an opening, give me the tools to make it easy for me to help recruiting efforts via my social network. You will build your talent pools, massively decrease your spend on agency fees, increase your quality of hire and in the long run increase staff retention. That should be more than enough reasons for you to deploy social sourcing into your recruitment efforts.

2. Mobile technology

Innovation is often associated with the introduction of new products or services in your business; however, it can also be about changing the way you operate.

Mobile technology has turned the world upside down and companies not taking advantage of this are missing a trick. Mobile technology allows you to engage with me through my most personal device anywhere anytime. Mobile applications allow you to cascade information to me through the use of push notifications. It increases my engagement by publishing timely, relevant content creating a personalised experience for me. It provides a platform for me to make HR transactions (absences/benefits/talent profiles etc.) eliminating paperwork. It increases employee referrals (see point 1 above) and can act as a social platform for me to build long lasting employee relationships. Interactive mobile learning even allows me to quickly sign up and complete required/relevant courses.

Providing the tools that encourages innovative thinking and action will inspire me to collaborate and share my knowledge, experience, skills and suggestions throughout the organisation driving efficiency. If I am tied up with longwinded, manual, administrative tasks I will not have time to innovate or focus on what is important.  

3.      People data

I often spend countless hours trying to get the right information to do my job, trying to get real time information is impossible. This results in frustration, lost productivity and I often end up relying on unreliable feedback from colleagues, gut feeling or instinct to make sometimes sub optimal decisions. My reputation and career prospects can be effected by the choices I make. I need quick access to real time information at the touch of a button to better inform my managers and make faster business decisions to drive sales, reduce costs, and improve productivity.

E.g. What if you knew in advance you were at risk of losing me, your top sales manager to a competitor. Could you prevent it by promoting me or assigning a new learning path? If you prevented it your revenues wouldn’t have dropped by 30% over the last two quarters. Now that I left who can replace me? Do you have the talent internally or do you need to look externally? Maybe you need to upskill someone internally? If you look externally how long will it take you to get them up to speed? What impact will these changes have on the organisation?

Again for most businesses, I am the largest source of cost and biggest area for potential growth and innovation. Effectively using people analytics to understand me and what drives me to perform can provide significant commercial advantage.

So what? Who cares if you continue to ignore me?

Again a lot of people talk about the importance of my engagement but do very little in terms of trying to improve it. So what about my disengagement? I can tell you it is very costly! In studies by the Queens School of Business and by the Gallup Organization, disengaged workers had:

·        37% higher absenteeism

·        49% more accidents, and

·        60% more errors and defects

In organizations with low employee engagement scores, they experienced:

·        18% lower productivity

·        16% lower profitability

·        37% lower job growth

·        65% lower share price over time.

Smart organisations invest in me because I enhance performance across all lines of business. All you need to do is stop ignoring me!

If you would like to discuss how an investment in me can drive growth in all areas of your organisation drop me a line at [email protected] or call me on: 011 892 48695

Parting thought

“When people start telling you that you’re crazy you might just be onto the most important innovation of your life” – Larry Ellison