Some more thoughts on managing in difficult times

Continuing on from my earlier post - some thoughts on what HR could do

Organisation:

Review organisation structure and see where opportunity exists to reduce duplication. Be open to new work structures and systems, be it temporary resources, project teams, home working or flexi time. It’s just not costs savings you will achieve here but also the means to address people aspirations for work life balance.

Recruitment

Evaluate cost effective contracting options- does the job need a permanent role holder would the purpose be better served with a temp resource?
You’ve always looked at managing recruitment budgets and costs. Now perhaps is the time to put in place metrics defining recruitment effectiveness. Measure how the quality of hires, speed of hire and recent hire retention rate has impact on business. Involve business and finance manager in the design and reporting of the recruitment effectiveness metric.

Capability Development

Extend your capability investments to your partners, temporary resources and project teams. Help them to stay connected to the business direction, mission and culture, as well as to the internal organizational networks that will enable them to work effectively.
In project based and temp worker based environment the Supervising Manager/ Executive is critical to getting the job done. Invest in him and equip him with new skills- communication, negotiating, feedback, monitoring- to master the complexities of managing a disparate and distant work parteners, defining systems and documentation necessary to ensure successful performance and productive relationships. Invest increasingly in supervisory/ management skills and softer skills for gainful people interactions. Investing in the skills of your Supervising Manager will also make raise the capability base of the entire organisation

Performance Systems

Resist the temptation to reconstruct your Performance System Management instead work on wider and stronger dissemination of business goals and performance metrics and causal factors to help every department, team, individual, partner understand what is key to business success and how they can contribute to it. A well conceived performance system has the ability to communicate what is important and what is not and to bring all parts of the business together in achieving business success. Use it!
Focus on strengthening the objectivity of performance measures. Ensure the quality and validity of data that sits behind the performance measure. Work with business to improve the predictive powers of business metrics and show folks how their actions can impact business in the future. It is likely to energise them knowing they are working towards a future that they have capability to create!

Organisation Activities

Look at ways to inculcate in employees a purpose beyond the organisation and self; How about organising the next company outbound around activities that have tangible economic and development benefits? Let the next team outbound be cleaning the neighbour basti; how about getting the team together to dig a canal? Lay a road? Build a night shelter? Manual work besides being good for the body is a great way of promoting respect for labour. At the end of it all you’ll have something concrete besides business results that will speak of team work.