Smart Redundancies

What I have learned about underutilization and preparing for redundancies.

The world has changed, the way we work has been transformed by something invincible. It has brought society, culture, companies, etc down roads that people did not think possible. Companies must evolve and make some hard choices. Redundancies are now on the cards for many companies, but using data to better help you understand the critical skills, availability, crucial roles and people within your enterprise will lead you to smarter decisions to safeguard your company into the future. Over the next few weeks, I will discuss ways to help companies make those decisions.

Track your Current Productivity and Utilization

It’s an age-old phrase but, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. This is too true of employee productivity and utilization where many variables govern how productive or how well utilized an employee is. Let’s take the example of a small business delivering products and services. What’s more productive, an employee who works 8 hours a day on internal product development or service delivery, or a similar employee who works 10 hours per day but spends 3 hours on administration, breaks and socializing – on face value, our 8 hour a day employee looks the most productive but we have no idea from hours alone how this impacts the goals and objectives of the business or compares to what the employee was planned to do.

6 Steps to how Employee Utilization and Productivity can affect your redundancy decisions  In summary, there are 6 simple steps to how your business can improve employee utilization and productivity including: 

1.    Implement some form of time recording – “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”, by capturing talent data such as time and skills you could understand your current utilization and productivity

2.    Define Appropriate Variables – if you sell services you will want to measure chargeable utilization, ensure you define variables that enable you to measure utilization and productivity that is applicable to your business.

3. Know the capacity of your staff – to take over projects and tasks from those that unfortunately have been let go and use underutilization to determine whether a role is no longer needed within the business

4.    Improve your planning – improving your resource deployment upfront not only improves your future resource productivity and utilization, but it will also give you a more realistic view of the health of the organization by comparing planned versus actual.

5.    Manage Customer Expectations – it gives you the opportunity to communicate to your entire project teams the importance of managing the external or internal customer’s expectation from initial inquiry all the way through to project delivery. In the long run, you have happier clients resulting in your employees having to perform less un-productive tasks.

6.    Encourage Collaboration – It will boost morale and productivity at a time when emotions may be high by creating an environment where your team members can easily share knowledge, skills, ideas, and lessons are learned which in turn helps to develop future leaders and senior individual contributors. This not only improves individual productivity it helps improve project standards and service delivery.

So if you would like to discuss this topic further or even discuss how ProFinda could help you on this journey please get in touch.