​With the current climate, and unemployment on a steady decline in Malta since 2014, businesses nationwide would be reckless not to have any strategies or programmes in place for retaining their staff. Even more so, when considering a company’s top talent. It could be devastating to lose a consistent top performer with clear potential.
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Dismissing an employee is one of the most difficult and unpleasant tasks a Manager will have to deal with. And so it should be. Irrespective of the reason for dismissal, as a Manager you are taking away somebodies’ livelihood and that is not a responsibility that should be taken lightly.
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The Chartered Institute of Personnel Development estimates that the cost of a bad hire can be in the region of €9,000, more if you take into account lost productivity and opportunity cost are taken into account. There are any number of reasons why employers make poor recruitment decisions. Rather than focus on what managers do wrong, employers need to look at three essential elements that ensure they will make the correct hiring decisions.
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If your company, regardless of size, aims to be successful on a long-term basis, it is vital that it can respond to fluctuations in the economy and endure dips in income. Being able to adapt to change and make changes even when the business is thriving is key. The hardest challenge for any organisation, in fact, is to challenge the status quo.
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“It's good practice for all organisations irrespective of size to undertake a periodic HR audit”. Although it takes a bit of time out of your week, you would not argue against having a regular health check-up. You would also follow it up with careful assessment of the advice received and do your best to tackle any issues raised by your physician. How often is the same approach adopted for assessing how well your HR function is performing? When was the last time you invested the time to step back from the day-to-day HR activity and ask yourself how effectively it is operating? When was it last reviewed? The answer is probably… well not infrequently enough.
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As the passengers and crew of the SS Titanic found, it’s the hidden dangers that you don’t see, the ones below the waterline, that can cause the most damage. The same could be happening in your business. On the surface everything is fine, accepted, there is the odd employee relationship issue but otherwise it’s pretty much ok, until your business hits the equivalent of an iceberg.
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Connecting with clients has been on a journey from transactional and consultative approaches through to the challenger sale. The “new” kid on the block for many blue-chip organisations is the power of storytelling which is certainly not new but has lots of scientific back up to its effectiveness.
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The past 40 years have been positive for HR, but that hasn’t always been the case. What if the business climate returned to that of the mid 1970’s? A generation of business leaders and HR professionals, two whole generations, have been fortunate to work in an environment where the focus on people management has been hugely positive, forward-thinking and in many ways visionary. The focus has been on recruitment, retention, engagement, organisational learning and development, people development, appraisal’s in their various formats, empowerment, coaching and wellbeing.
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Sales are the very heartbeat of any organisation. Without sales there wouldn't be an organisation. If a business doesn’t sell, it simply doesn't survive. Why is ‘sales’ such a “dirty word” in most organisations? So the mystery is, why do people, whose primary focus is to sell, avoid using the word “sales”? Account Manager, Client Services Manager, Client Relationship Manager, Growth Manager are all job titles that we are familiar with. Each of these titles is a mask for a sales role. Why hide the central purpose of your job function behind a misleading title?
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If you were suffering from a recurring medical complaint you’d seek medical advice. The doctor would examine you, maybe run several tests, and finally arrive at a diagnosis. He would then recommend a course of treatment to address the complaint. Why are symptoms not treated with the same seriousness in an organisation? Often resignations are an easy symptom to spot. But most fail to investigate, diagnose and treat the symptom.
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“Our sales team don’t pre-qualify well enough” “Forecasting is poor to non-existent” “Our sales people are using price as their major sales weapon” ​ Many sales managers complain about these issues but few know how to approach a plausible solution. Consider two members of your sales team that need the most help in this area and think about the financial impact on your business they were to become as effective your two top salespeople. Consider how long the two underperforming sales people have held their jobs and do the math. The cost over the years will be significant. Why has this situation continued for so long?
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​"You can never judge a book by its cover” is never truer than in the sales industry. We’ve all done it; judged a person by the sandals they were wearing, their designer handbag, their quiet, reserved or shy demeanour, the city they live in, the phone they own, etc. We are predominantly visual, we can’t help it. The visual area at the back of our brains makes up 30% of our cortex, so it’s no surprise that we create an impression of a person in our own minds almost immediately. The question we should be asking is… “is this helping us or hurting us as sales-people?”.
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