NEWSFLASHES
Strategic HRM now needed more than ever before. |
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Now that the credit crunch is influencing the world economy and there is a threat of recession or it is already upon us, a strategic personnel vision is needed more than ever before.Scepticism runs rampant and pessimism predominates during a crisis. This means that many people including managers will start to act emotionally. Turnovers sometimes drop by dozens of percentage points which, in turn, leads people to want to reduce costs.
When implementing cost reductions, people will quickly turn to the larger items on the budget and to those items on which savings can easily be made in the short term. Hundreds of flexible workers have already experienced this personally. They form the group that are now again the victim of a lack of guts and decisiveness to modify the law governing redundancy.
Long-term thinking
Sadly, the long-term vision is again not really being considered. Every recession has a beginning and an end. To put it even more strongly, after a recession we always have strong growth, a growth where employees are required as the production factor. By responding to the drop in demand whilst panicking and being irrational, it appears as if a problem is being solved in the short term, but, in many cases, this intervention in current conditions leads to a new and much larger problem.
The first baby boom batch of people will start to enjoy their pension, insofar as they are still working, by 2010. Between 2010 and 2020, the potential with regard to employees will drop by many percentage points. A more serious crisis than the crisis from which we are currently emerging may be brought about by responding to this now as companies. A crisis that will be caused by a shortage of Human Resources! Since this will be a worldwide crisis, it cannot be expected that it can be solved by getting manpower from the Eastern bloc or Asia. The burgeoning economies in these places will have developed in full by this time and, therefore, will form a formidable competitor on the labour market.
Tips
This is why we now provide a few tips to evade this crisis.
1. Do not participate in the doom and gloom.
Every crisis offers opportunities. Find those opportunities instead of blindly accepting threats. Make sure you exude customer confidence in the future towards your employees. Communicate in an open and honest way but full of confidence towards the future.
If you exude pessimism, this will directly influence your employees. If a ship sinks, all rats will abandon ship. The rats that can swim best will leave first. Your employees with the most talents and the best competences will grab their chance and will take their talents to other companies. Your Human Capital will be destroyed.
2. Investigate the actual talents and competences of your employees and map these out.
Adapt positions and packages of tasks to the talents of your employees. The productivity of your employees will, thus, increase. Mapping out the talents of your employees will, in many cases, make the possibility to develop new products and services visible. Enlarging your market will then be possible.
3. Deploy your employees to optimise processes.
Many employees have excellent ideas about process improvements. This will ensure that process loss costs can and will drop and that margins will become larger. A culture of continuous improvement will also be created that will provide returns on an annual basis.
4. If you temporarily do not have any work for your employees, invest in training for future work.
If this is financially impossible, create job and flex polls with other companies in the region through which temporary personnel is placed on loan at fellow companies that require personnel. Collective training and education can also take place in the job pool.
5. Draw up a personnel plan.
Map out who amongst your employees will be leaving your company in the short and medium term and define successors. Train successors so that they can seamlessly take over the tasks of the employees who are leaving.
Author: Ad de Beer
Publication date: 20-01-2009
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