DO YOU KNOW YOUR EMPLOYEES?

 

No matter how good your talent management system is, it can only provide you with standard quantitative and qualitative information about your people. Sometimes those comprehensive information about your people could be misleading because of the lack of a one on one feedback system. 

We all also know that businesses with best people in them win. Those businesses will attract and at the same time able to retain their best people.  So, do you really know your people?

 

Having a deeper understanding about all your people rather than just depend on the system, with slightly more attention to those star performers, will prevent your business from loosing them to your competitor. Using conventional talent management system is not enough to keep star performers because they always want the freedom to use their abilities according to their personal work styles.

The personal one on one relationship with those highly effective people will produce continued high performance and commitment to the success of the business. Sadly, this very important part was often overlooked in many companies. The owners and/or leaders of those businesses only then rushed to have more personal meeting, in their effort to regain the commitment from those star performers, far too late after their star performers have the “deals sealed” with other companies. One common reason why many businesses struggle to successfully retain their best people is that they lack focus on people. 

When a business undertakes annual strategy review process, there are usually many areas of business growth and process improvements identified with a number of key goals are agreed on. However, there could be too many goals and the emphasize and prioritizing are on the top-line and bottom-line results, the ultimate goals the organization wants to achieve. As the result, those situations have many times caused the people development related goals which are very vital to the business, then overlooked.

Every leader will always say that people are the most valuable asset of any organization yet they often forget that people need both "maintenance and upgrading," too. Business need to also provide preventive maintenance activities for their people. We can just replace a machine by purchasing a new one when we lose a machine. But lose a star performer means not only you lose the time and money already spent in developing that person but you lose also the potential to achieve good future results from that person. If that star performer is joining your competitor, the list of negative impacts will grow longer.

Just always keep in mind that even a very sophisticated human resources system will never ever replace simple relationship among people in which a constant two way communication is maintained. In today’s rapid alternative communication technology development, people tend to replace the important one on one face to face meetings or phone conversations with just sending e-mails and text messaging.

BE A LEADER WHO LEADS BY MEANS RATHER THAN JUST BY MINDS. BE A LEADER WHO IS CONTROLLED BY HEAD BUT ACTS AND RULES BY HEART.