Blog: HR Periscope

As we are now unfortunately in a recession, the current focus for most businesses is unlikely to be on recruiting staff, but now more than ever there is a need for organisations of whatever size to ensure that they are are as efficient and effective as possible.

A critical key to this is having staff with the right skills, in the right roles within your organisation. You may have noticed politicians talking about upskilling staff affected by redunancies to find the new jobs. This leads me to two inter-related questions. 1. Do prospective employees know what skills they require in order to work within your organisation? and 2)Beyond the knowledge that you need skilled staff do you know what specific skills you require, such that anyone could readily be able to identify individuals that would be suited to work within your organisation?

If the answer to either of these questions is no, then I believe you as an employer are missing something, asemployers are known to complain that young people coming into the workplace do not have the required skills. Now is the time for you to stand up and clearly articulate your requirements so that individuals going out for retraining and the people supporting them can make sure that they will be able to fulfil your business needs.

This is also important for your current workforce as through schemes such as Train to Gain there is currently a considerable amount of financial support is available to help you to develop your Staff.

I would recommend that you seize the opportunity and take a few steps as follows:

1. Review your business objectives/ plan for the next few years

2. Identify the skills and competencies you are going to need to meet your business objectives. If necessary get help in doing.

3. Develop this into a framework of roles which identifies not just the skills and qualifications, but also the wider abilities and attitudes that enable effectiveness such as communicatin skills and confidence to undertake different activities.

4. Assess the abilities of your current staff against both your immediate and future requirements in order to identify where you can develop current staff to fulfil roles and where you are likely to have gaps going forward that need to be filled external.

5. Make sure that the processes that you use to identify staff for development and promotion are open and fair taking into account the views and interests of your staff. This is important in order to prevent any legal claims of unfairness, but it’s of equal importance to ensure your staff remain engaged and positive about working with your organisation.

6. Begin to think about how you are going to fill the gaps (when the need arises) by recruiting employees, contractors or possibly outsourcing.

If you miss this opportunity and don’t begin to prepare now, when we come out of this recession in a year or two or whenever it may be, you may be caught of guard in a reenergised battle for skilled employees.

Susan Popoola

Conning Towers
HR Transformation & Talent Management
Leveraging the Power of People

Copyright 2008 This document is the specific intellectual property of the Conning Towers Consultancy. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Labels: Human Resources, redundancies, Skills, Train to Gain

A reality that cannot be denied is that 2009 will at the very least start of with a number of economic uncertainties and there is no doubt that the British economy has definitely slowed down. As a consequence, many businesses will go into survival moment and automatically be planning to cut jobs in order survive. This may help in the short term, but in the longer term when things pick up again organisations that do so may find themselves struggling to find the people with the right skills to support their businesses picking up.

On the other hand in spite of the economic climate, there will be people who start of new businesses this year that will actually thrive. This suggests that there are still a lot of opportunities out there for businesses that are able to identify them. I would therefore suggest that you start of the New Year by doing the following:

· Review your business objectives and activities, considering what areas of your business have been the most profitable and are likely to be the most profitable going forward. Consider if there are new areas that you can expand into that would be specifically beneficial at this point in time. If you have difficulty in working this out for yourself, speak to a few of you current customers and try and get an indication of what their requirements are likely be going forward.

· Develop a skills (or competency) framework to match your business requirements. You’ll find this useful to your organisation in the future as well.

· Do a skill’s audit for your staff you may be surprised at the latent or hidden skills that some of your staff members may have that may be crucial for both this period and the future of your organisation even if their current roles become redundant.

· Make changes to your staffing structure accordingly. At this point you may find that there are employees for whom there is no longer a role within the organisation or too many employees for a specific role. If this is the case you may have to bring in redundancy procedures, but you can do so knowing that you can clearly justify your actions.

· Even at this stage it is possible to consider other options to redundancy with employees such a reduced hours or a (temporary) salary decrease as long as this does not take employees below the minimum wage.

· If there are other organisations that you have a good relationship with there is a possibility that you can also share the time/services of staff or even second them for a period to the ‘sister’ organisation.

· There may also be employees who would like to take time of work to go on a training course. This may be a good time to support them in doing so.

Ultimately, be creative! However, If you are going to have to go for redundancies or consider any other option such as those mentioned above, communicate regularly with your employees and keep them abreast with the options, be aware that it will be essential that you first seek legal advice and that employee terms and conditions will need to be updated to reflect the changes made.

Susan Popoola
Conning Towers
HR Transformation & Talent Management
Leveraging the Power of People

Copyright 2008 This document is the specific intellectual property of the Conning Towers Consultancy. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Labels: Human Resources, redundancies, Talent Management, Workforce Planning