How to Get the Most Out of Your Workforce

For your company to succeed, you’ll need to exploit all the talents of your workforce and make sure everyone is doing the best they can. The strongest companies leverage employees’ skills and talents to their best possible use and find ways to become more successful.

Here are a few ways to get the most out of your workforce:

Lead by Example

It’s common for new employees to get jobs and start with positive attitudes, strong work ethics, and wanting to do their best. What happens after is often up to the company’s leadership and the example it sets for employees.

If leaders don’t believe their companies are worth their time and effort, employees will pick up those negative attitudes and behaviors. If leaders show enthusiasm for their companies or their places in industries and communities, however, employees may do so as well and give their best work.

Invest in Employees

Do your employees have everything they need to do their jobs at the highest possible levels given your company’s economic situation? Are managers and supervisors taught to check in with employees to understand their struggles and successes?

Investing can mean providing working equipment, training, or other items that have financial costs. It can also mean spending the time it takes to encourage, teach, and support employees so they want to do better. However you define investing in your employees, those investments will yield dividends in work output and what your employees can do in given jobs.

Create an Open Environment

Many companies give lip service to an open environment where employees can raise problems and give honest feedback regarding leadership, but they make one of two mistakes when they attempt to do this. First, they ask for feedback but ignore it when it’s received. Feedback needs to be acknowledged, and if there are good reasons why it can’t be implemented, that needs to be explained.

Second, company leadership may talk a good game about an open environment, then unintentionally punish employees who speak out about problems. This can be very nuanced, but if employees come to feel leadership is anything less than 100% genuine in the desire to have an open environment, they won’t be willing to speak honestly even when given chances to do so.

Cull Employees’ Ideas

Employees come up with unique, workable ideas that may never occur to leadership. However, they might still benefit the company when implemented. Taking those good ideas from employees will not only help a company in the long run, but this will also show the company values employee input and employees can have powerful impacts on the company with their ideas.

Your organization will only benefit from allowing employees to share ideas. Don’t forget to give credit and reward employees when possible if their ideas are used.

Measure Engagement and Satisfaction

Employee engagement and satisfaction profoundly affect how hard employees are willing to work and whether they’re willing to give their absolute best to a company. If you aren’t sure how engaged your employees are, you should measure their levels of satisfaction.

If the levels of engagement and satisfaction aren’t high, these are areas you need to work on to get the most from your employees. There are many programs that help with this in addition to going directly to employees to find out what can be done better.

Invest in Continuing Education

Continuing education in the form of training, tuition reimbursement, and other educational programs will help employees learn new skills as needed. It can also help keep their motivation levels high. Rather than just providing continuing education to be able to say they did so, employers need to carefully consider which opportunities will have the most positive impacts on their companies.

Useless training can have the exact opposite result from what’s wanted and may send employee engagement plummeting. Bored employees will also wonder what the purposes of their efforts are. When training is appropriate and helpful, employees will appreciate this and it will reflect well on the company.

Use Technology to Automate

Technology can be used to automate many routine tasks, which can make employees’ jobs easier and more interesting. By freeing up employees’ time, they can solve problems and be more creative.

Automation extends the productive abilities of your employees, allowing them to get more done in less time.

Hire Carefully

When you hire staff carefully and find the right people, it can make all the difference in their productivity levels and abilities to get work done in the best possible ways. Taking your time and finding the expertise you need to make the best hires is worth it when you don’t have to rehire or retrain individuals that didn’t work out.

All the retraining in the world usually won’t turn a bad hire into a good one. There’s no substitute for expertise, and if you don’t have it in-house, you’ll need to work with recruiters to ensure the best possible talent is found and to make sure the best candidate can get a job.

GDH provides recruiting expertise to businesses of all sizes and types. If you need help with any part of your hiring process, contact us.