Employers: Fight Inflation by Improving Your Workforce Development System

Covid 19 and inflation have this in common; few escape the impact that they have inflicted. These wide-ranging effects are felt everywhere – at home, at work, and in every community; demanding that we change and adjust to their presence. In the case of inflation, the first line of attack for businesses usually includes the search for lower material prices, cost savings in operational areas, and, unfortunately, the perceived need to cut staff levels. However, with supply chain issues complicating matters and labor market challenges confounding the picture, there is a need to look in other places for efficiencies, savings, and improvement opportunities. As organizational leaders search for these elusive prospects, don’t forget to look at your people development system (PDS).

Continuous Improvement for the PDS

Although the concepts of continuous improvement have gained ground in many industries, often times, the PDS is overlooked as a system ripe for improvement efforts. For clarity, the typical PDS consists of the processes needed to attract, train, and retain talent:

• Recruiting
• Onboarding
• Retention
• Performance management, and the engine that drives the PDS
• Training

Even if these workforce training and development processes seem to be doing well and yielding acceptable outcomes, the system as a whole, and each of these processes separately, can still be examined to identify waste and opportunities for improvement. In future posts we’ll explore the potential of improvement in other PDS functions, but for now, let’s consider the processes for recruiting and onboarding.

Look for the Less Obvious Options

At a chamber of commerce sponsored event last week I heard a panel of employers discussing the changes they made to improve their efforts to attract and retain talent. The bulk of the conversation focused on the obvious levers – increasing wages, offering flexible schedules, increasing benefits, etc. Not much was said about the less obvious opportunities. Those opportunities that are often part of the system and can easily become invisible. These are varied and can include things like creating more inviting job postings that appeal to different audiences. Connecting to new and different recruiting avenues in the community that might help diversify the team. Evaluating recruiting sources and methods. Looking closely at communication pieces that are shown to potential new team members or to the community. How might these tools used during the recruiting effort be improved?

The Importance of Connections

The optimized PDS operates as a complete system utilizing connections and feedback from all five areas. For example; does the training program inform your recruiting efforts by helping to identify the ideal candidate’s knowledge, skills, and abilities? Does the training program also help build out the job descriptions and job postings thereby increasing the probability of training success? By connecting training to recruiting, the PDS becomes more efficient and can ultimately save money by making the recruiting process more effective. Connections should exist across the PDS, how might they be strengthened?

Versatile PDS Tools

Enhancing employee engagement can reduce turnover, driving down costs. These efforts start in the recruiting stages, gain momentum in the onboarding process, and are sustained throughout the other PDS processes. Using an onboarding plan and schedule can help with new employee engagement and potentially reduce attrition at the early stages of their time with the organization. Presenting a new hire with a personalized development pathway can increase the likelihood that they will stay connected longer, allowing the company to realize an ROI. This pathway is created by and used throughout the whole PDS. If you have this tool, how well is it performing? If you don’t, can you add it to your PDS tool kit? Also, a well-designed onboarding process will optimize the time and effort of everyone involved. Another source of savings.

Other Potential Improvements

It seems as though, pressured by current circumstances, many companies have made the screening process less strenuous by lowering standards and eliminating requirements and steps. After all, there is a need to get people in the door quickly. Could this be contributing to the cycle of high turnover that many are experiencing? There’s a future blog post on this whole idea, but for now the question is; can the recruiting and onboarding process be improved by updating screening tools and methods? Bringing the right person on in the right way could help reduce losses when a mismatch results in their departure. When they walk out the door, the organization’s investment up to that point goes out the door too. Perhaps the better investment is to be more selective in the early stages. It might seem counterintuitive, but certainly worth debating.

Improving the PDS Adds Value

For organizational leaders, in the face of stubborn inflation, the challenge is to find innovative ways to offset higher costs by gaining efficiency, cutting waste, and improving processes in all the systems within their control. Since every organization has a PDS in some form, operating at some level of efficiency, it stands to reason that working to continuously improve this important system can contribute to the bottom line, often in dramatic ways.

It’s Worth the Time and Effort

Like improvement efforts on all complex systems, it will take time to explore the PDS for opportunities. Numerous studies, papers, and articles suggest that high inflation is going to be with us for a long while. Which means that the time invested to improve the system should allow the ROI to be realized in the current circumstances and any changes implemented to pay dividends even after inflation is tamed.