Improving Businesses through People Management.

By Fostine Opiyo Odhiambo – HR Practitioner – Kenya.

My 16 Years of work experience in human resource management has been an exciting one. I have accumulated expertise in improving businesses through people management. I believe in the concept of building your people before you build your product or service.

How best do you build your workforce? How best can you engage your workforce? Is it possible to handle employees individually and not collectively with fairness? What about handling matters of succession levels within your organization? Today's workforce needs immediate results, benefits, and satisfaction. The patience that our parents endured at work is no longer there. Today the workforce will resign just by ‘sms’ or through social media. Work ethics is deteriorating daily.

Is there still hope for growth with the current workforce? What about toxic work environments, can we pick some lessons? With technology leading in almost everything. Is it possible to make the Modern Manager in this Fourth Industrial Revolution era?

Let us learn and share our expertise on such topics. Today I will take you through the concept of making your people before you make your products or service. Specifically, I will concentrate on building or making your employees first.

Lesson 1: Make Your People Before You Make Your Products or Service.

Learning how to use talent management to achieve competitive advantage in global organizations is a necessity for improving businesses. I believe in the concept of making your people before you make your product or service. People here will include employees, customers, and suppliers. The bottom line is making your workforce before doing anything.

This thought-provoking topic has led me to conduct research on what people (the idea generators, strategic planners, and the founders) consider when they are starting their businesses or organizations. My main interest has been to identify if people management is a key part of their dream or plans. Do they believe the people management aspect is an essential consideration factor when dreaming, planning, and executing their idea? What plans do they have in place to ensure they fully utilize the potential in the workforce they will hire or are already on board? What about retention plans and talent development plans?

In my engagements with various leaders for profit-making organizations, the moneymaking factor was the leading motivator while for non-profit-making organizations, creating an impact within communities and on individuals was the driving factor.

In all the scenarios, there is the aspect of people being involved but not people management. To make a profit you must have people to be involved in strategies on how to generate revenues. People are also involved in creating impact within communities for non-profit making organizations. People management and involvement in business improvement is not having the attention it deserves. Creating impact, revenue generations, expansion programs, use of technology, and growth take the lead forgetting the power and influence of the workforce in the process of business improvement. People are an essential factor, important element, and enabler in all the processes of improving businesses. People, both Internal and external (Employees, Customers, and Suppliers), are the most important part of an organization. Successful organizations focus on developing internal people and building trust with external people.

For this first lesson, I will concentrate on making your employees before you make your products or service. Is it possible to have the picture of the workforce that you need for the organization you wish to establish? If your organization is existing, you need to ask yourself if the team you are currently having is the best for your organization, or in cases of mergers ask yourself about the workforce to form the next merged business/organization.

What does ‘Making your employees before you make your products or service practically mean today?’ It means that before you choose your workforce, before you merged your business, or before you redesign your organization, you should consider all the aspects of your workforce by making sure they all have a chance to reach their full potential. The key point here is how to reach their full potential.

For your employees to reach their full potential, you should look at their welfare wholesomely. Looking beyond the salaries and extending on matters of skills development, mental health well-being, and flexibility in processes that include time and work location, equality, and protection against all sorts of harassment, harm, and abuse at work and beyond. For your employees to reach their potential they need to be happy before, during, and after work. The Home - Away Happiness parameters should apply where employees behave normally without compromising or without pretending about a situation (s).

The following important steps will help you make your people before making your products or service:

       i.           Provide insight into the value of people to organizational success: This first step involves using outside thinking in the preparation of the case of making your people before making your products. This means having insights drawn from labor market data and relating these to the business context. Engaging the people management agenda the in the business strategy setting as well as its outcomes. Ensuring the concept is accepted at the board level, legitimate, and value-adding. Concisely, ensuring that people's agenda becomes an integral part of the business agenda.

     ii.           Convert insight into a business case: This involves the process of making the business case for making your people before making your products by providing strategic reasoning to the top leadership and founders. This should include supporting your case using words like ‘ people are our greatest assets’ When planning to invest in technology you also invest in the people on how to utilize the intended technology as well as enabling constant recognition, enriched clear and visible growth path to all employees on the integration of technology and humanity. The segmentation and tracking of individual performance to profit will also be essential in this step two. There is a strong correlation between financial performances as measured by profit per employee. In this concept of making, your people before you make your product or service consider the projection of each employee in relation to profit contribution. This will help you build the business case. For example ‘in hiring Fostine as your Group HR Manager you will expect him to at least add value into your profit-making process by 21% ……. This is by delivering on …… and by …………’ Such inner conversations will make your case stronger. You will therefore be in a position to secure the required resources as well as the stakeholders’ commitment and goodwill.

   iii.           Ensure an organization-wide understanding and buy-in to the talent definition: Obtaining the commitment and stakeholders’ goodwill will lead to the concept that everyone has a talent or more and such talent(s) can be utilized to improve your business or organization. For instance when planning on the workforce, maybe you say you will need a driver. As a manager, you must quantify the contribution of this driver to be hired in terms of his/her impact on the business. The utilization of this potential of the workforce should ring in the mind of the strategic planning strategist.

For existing organizations, the employees should recognize that despite each employee having a talent or more, you should recognize that opportunities that exist are not automatically awarded but earned. Making your people before you make your product is an earned concept. It is a 360-degree approach whereas the willingness to learn, the willingness to take ownership and responsibilities within your career areas, and the willingness to acquire new skills take the centre stage in the changing landscape of talent definition.

   iv.           Have an inclusive/selective talent strategy with equal emphasis on each area: This step will require the development of a strategy that balances the need to fill key positions (succession planning, selective roles, and people development) with the need to develop a potential of the whole workforce in an inclusive way.

     v.           Make the CEO the talent champion: Your CEO should own the entire talent process. People management without engaging the CEO is an automatic failure. To make your CEO a talent champion integrity and professionalism supported with data will be some of the factors to help integrate the talent's strategy and the overall business strategy. The question of why do we need this talent. Why and how to develop this talent, a reason to reward the talent this way, and why we need to do away with this role can simply be responded to in a more professional manner. When the CEO is the talent champion making your people before you make your product or service will be manageable.

   vi.           Join up the talent management activity with business activity and other people management strategies: Talent management should not be stand-alone. First, it should be joined up with other parts of HR management and then be included in the entire organization's strategy. People Management is part of the success and should be part of the overall strategy.

 vii.           Deliver talent management brilliantly within your organization and have excellence in implementation: Spend as much time on the implementation as on strategy setting. The creation of a coherent project plan for the delivery of the strategy necessitates the creation of goals and targets, allocation of responsibilities and actions, risk management, and thinking through and anticipating implementation issues, as they will occur through the business improvement processes. Creating a cross-functional and multi-discipline project team will hasten the entire process. Clarity on the expectation of all the stakeholders and their roles will help solve any confusion in the process of delivering talent management.

viii.            Make sure there is involvement from all of the organization’s stakeholders: The success of talent management is a function of effective stakeholder involvement, senior-level support, and relevant information. Those responsible for delivering the concept of making your people before you make your product or service (talent managers and HR practitioners) are likely to have more influence than power. Their success in delivering on the strategy will include the involvement of the Board members (to discuss the strategic impact of the idea on shareholders and customers alike). The executive team (interested in securing enough resources for their team or functional area). Managers ( responsible for making it happen) and Employees will have to understand that the concept of making your people before you make your products is not an automatic right to extra investment or a higher reward package but something that has to be actively sought, managed, and earned.

Conclusion:

Improving businesses through people management is possible when you embrace the concept of making your people before you make your products or service. As you plan to come up with a new product that will serve the need of your clients, consider the people factor. When you plan to expand or merge your business, consider the people factor, when you are winding down or closing your business or project still think of the people factor. Utilization of the full potential in your existing workforce and the intended workforce is the essence of making your people before you make your products or service. There may be many challenges in the talent strategy development process but remember the solutions are with the people first not even in technology or money. People have solutions for most things. Fix your people first to fix your business. Let us mold them, support them and summarily make them before we make our products and services.

In the next lesson, we will look at the aspect of making your customers as part of improving business through people management and then finalize with making your supplier

Always remember the steps stipulated above.

Reach out to me at:

Mobile: +254 724 224913 Email: fostineodhiambo@gmail.com OR fostine@joafrica.com

Website: www.joafrica.com

 For: Human Resource Management Services; Business Improvement, HR Strategy Development, Strategic Workforce Planning, Employee Engagement Services, Gaining the Full Potential of your workforce, Women and Leadership topics, Workforce Happiness, and their well-being just reach out.

The Future is Full of Potential! A Potential of Happy Minds

Notes:

My mentor Professor Paul Turner and Danny Kalman in their book titled ‘Make Your People before you make your Products’ discussed the above steps extensively.

Additional notes are from the training I attended on Using Talent Management to Achieve an Advantage in Global Organizations and my accumulated engagement and research on what founders, idea generators, and investors look for before starting an organization or before implementing a dream.

Let us meet in the next lesson. Thanks for your support.