During an economic downturn, large and small businesses find it quite a challenging task to survive the crisis while still being able to manage their talent. This is a time when you have to deal with more significant issues like dropping sales and revenue and loss of customers, and it is not at all easy to shift your focus on talent management.
It needs a disciplined and balanced approach. The businesses that succeed in managing talent efficiently during a recession period do not only find it easy to survive the crisis, but they also get a significant competitive edge over their competitors once things settle down and the market recovers. Following is a brief rundown on five handy tips on how to manage talent during an economic downturn.
Manage Executive Talent
During an economic crisis, when the volume of sales gets adversely affected, you should not just go ahead and start firing employees from your organization Rainiertamayo. You have to be very careful about who you retain and who you fire. If you are firing someone who has been performing well, this is a significant loss for you. If they are talented enough, they will get another (probably, much better) job because your competitors need such talent to survive the economic crisis.
Therefore, this is the time when you have to focus more on leadership development programs. You do not just have to retain your skilled employees, but you also have to work effectively to hire other top talents from the industry. Always remember, when it comes to developing future leadership talent, results-based communication and management skills play an equally important role as do crisis management and strategic thinking skills.
For example, the high performers love to accept new challenges, and they want to give their best contribution to have their presence felt. So, this is the best time to develop out-of-the-box assignments and projects that can help your business not just survive the economic downturn but also to grow faster.
Replace Under-Performers With Better Talent
Just reducing the workforce will not help much during an economic downturn; a better strategy is to replace under-performing employees from your organization with better talent. During a period of recession, when people lose their jobs in a large number, you can have easy access to a broader talent pool. You can hire better talent at a lesser salary with promises of tremendous growth opportunities once the economy recovers. In short, retaining under-performers does not make sense at all; let them go. But, at the same time, you must focus on recruiting and retaining high performers.
Nurture Your Top Performers
Depending upon the nature of your business, you may not afford to lose certain types of employees. For example, if you are running a telecommunications company, you should never fire an experienced digital engineer; likewise, if it is a medical center, you must retain the experienced surgical nurses. Your business will probably become handicapped without them.
The worse thing is that it is tough to hire better talents in such fields immediately. As said earlier, your competitors are also on a lookout for experienced, talented individuals. If you do not take care of such employees, such as by offering them some added benefits, they are very much likely to resign and accept a better job offer.
Some proven retention strategies in this regard may include training, self-development, and compensation. In short, you have to offer them all the benefits in a way that should make them feel that their growth opportunities are not blocked while they are working for you and that they cannot get a better deal somewhere else. While you are firing or cutting down the salaries of under-performers, you must consider increasing the incentives for these pivotal employees. You cannot expect employees that are being under-paid to over-perform.
Make Investment In Your Talent
If you do some study and analysis of those companies who did not just manage to survive the economic downturn but also succeeded in flourishing their businesses, you will find that their secret lies in their talent management strategies. If you also want to survive the economic crisis and to let your business grow despite the bad economic times, you must also consider making some serious, well-planned investments in the talent pool of your organization. For example, when the sales drop, businesses tend to cut down the salaries of their employees, which is not always the best strategy to deal with the monster of economic downturn.
Adjusting compensation levels downwards will encourage the best talent in your business to look for better job offers; you need to keep in mind that the demand for experienced professionals and employees with impressive work record grows tremendously during an economic downturn. Therefore, instead of cutting down their salaries, you should consider making some investments to retain them. However, your decision regarding how much and what kind of venture you should make will depend upon an array of factors, such as sales growth, productivity gains, and other such hard data.
Plan In Advance
Economic downturns can hit you anytime because things in the market fluctuate heavily depending upon a large number of factors that you have no control on. 10 to 20 percent of reduction can happen anytime in the sales volume. When you are prepared in advance , you will be in a better position to manage through it Pubg pc. The problem with most companies that fail to survive during a recession is that they turn inward during such difficult economic times.
The better strategy, however, is to focus on customer needs; you should look outward, not inward. Effective management communications play a crucial role during such circumstances, as you may have to motivate your workers and employees to work harder for less. This is how Intel had famously survived the 1980 economic downturn, and they successfully launched the Pentium Microprocessor. However, before you implement any of the above strategies, you need to make sure that it will help you achieve the bottom-line results.