Success in business requires proper planning and execution. We can’t effectively plan for our future success without properly diagnosing the present state of our organizations.

The TM Solutions Business Diagnostic Series addresses several key points to consider when assessing your business and how well it’s positioned for marketplace success.  We tackle fundamental concepts like Managing Profitability, Minimizing Risk, Maximizing Productivity, Improving Expertise and Capabilities, Strengthening Leadership Teams, and Investing in People. 

Last week’s diagnostic piece outlined the thought processes and check-up questions for Minimizing Risk. Today’s installment addresses the “fire in the furnace”—Maximizing Productivity across the company footprint. Managing profitability and Minimizing Risk address critical measures of a strong balance sheet and compliance framework, while employee productivity is the fuel that drives an organization’s success across the board.

Through our experience in working with some of the most successful companies in American business, TM Solutions has uncovered four success factors in maximizing productivity: enhancing team production, quality, and efficiency, creating a culture of accountability, improving leader and employee engagement levels, and reducing employee turnover to acceptable levels.

Enhancing Team Production, Quality, and Efficiency

Most companies have some kind of performance management program in place; unfortunately, most of these programs are inadequate to deal with the pace and urgency of modern business.  If your company is relying on the traditional once or twice-a-year engagement model without ongoing performance feedback and dialogue, your managers are missing the greatest opportunity to maximize team production, quality, and efficiency and will struggle to respond to changing market conditions.

To keep people and their productivity high and centered on more consistent achievement of business goals, companies must stay attuned to leveraging the strengths and minimizing the liabilities of each team member on a regular basis. We must also understand the wants and needs of each individual and how well these align with the team’s and organization’s goals.

To adjust to the demands of both the business and employees, companies need to have more dynamic performance processes and tools allowing managers to provide high impact feedback on a daily or weekly basis, rather than simply spending several hours a few times each year.  This means that they should be able to spend just a few minutes, whenever needs arise, to check the pulse of particular team members and ensure that productivity is maximized, along with employee engagement from proper communication, coaching and motivation techniques tailored to each employee’s needs.

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Can our performance management program provide individualized take-action strategies ready to implement right away?  Or is this only provided once or twice a year?

2.       Are we aware of each team member’s wants and needs, natural strengths or potential liabilities?

3.       Can we provide coaching and guidance to each employee on how to improve productivity, quality of work, or team effectiveness? Can we do this in a matter of minutes and “on-the-fly?”

4.       Do our leadership teams use effective communication strategies to engage and develop their teams?

Creating a Culture of Accountability

Many organizations have a problem with accountability.  Often, a lack of accountability permeates the management ranks, and it’s no surprise that front-line teams take on this culture from their managers.  While everyone wants to be holding the keys when the company drives to success, many blame or excuse responsibility when things go wrong. 

Accountability is one of the core competencies of leadership.  Good leaders take responsibility for losses with every bit the fervor that they do when the company profits. They do this because  failure is the best teacher. When we take a proper level of accountability for a loss, we learn, we grow, setting up many future wins as a result.

While creating a culture of accountability clearly begins at the top, the process must flow through an entire organization.  Organizational standards must clearly recognize and reward success, so that the company can hold up examples to which others may aspire in their own work.  Ultimately, having organizational accountability means setting a foundation for confronting problems and outright failures, with the goal of improving and growing the people and teams responsible.

Companies must look to reward success and address failure with great frequency and as early as possible.  No great success should take too long to achieve reward, while failure should be anticipated and addressed with great urgency as well.

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Do our leaders hold themselves and others responsible and answerable for planning, execution and achieving business results, in both good and bad times?

2.       Are standards and expectations clearly communicated to everyone?  Do our peers and direct reports understand what success looks like?

3.       Do we regularly recognize and reward success?  Can we distinguish our top performers from everyone else? 

4.       Do we confront organizational performance problems early and frequently? 

Improving Leader and Employee Engagement Levels

To maximize productivity, you must first maximize the engagement levels of your company’s leaders and employees.  Since companies engage with each individual, leaders and managers must understand what motivates their employees.  While some respond with financial incentives, others want assurances that they can grow within their current roles or earn promotions with greater responsibility.

Leaders must pride themselves not on having their own way of leading teams, but in individualized ways that they use to reach each team member. This approach maximizes the individual, and, by extension, then maximizes the potential of the team.  To achieve this level of engagement, leaders must adapt their personal styles, rather than adhering to a “my way or the highway” mentality, in order to earn respect, build trust, and influence each member of their team.

One element of adapting personal leadership style that is a necessary component of individualizing their management approach is taking a personal interest in each employee. When leaders and managers take a personal interest in the well-being, wants, and needs of each employee, they are better able to tailor their management styles and motivation techniques to each one more effectively.

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Do we understand what makes each of our employees tick? Is it money, status or reputation, growth opportunities, control, autonomy, or is it something else?

2.       Do we motivate and engage our teams with an individualized approach? 

3.       Do our leaders adapt their styles to various situations and people to earn respect, build trust and expand their influence?

4.       Do our leaders take a personal interest in their teams?

Reducing Employee Turnover to Acceptable Levels

Many companies that are otherwise successful fail to reach their full productivity, and thus, profitability, because they fail to retain talented employees.  If we understand an employee’s individual wants and needs, and their expectations from the company in exchange for their performance, we can better understand why they may leave—even when times are good for the company.

The strongest companies are proactive in addressing employee turnover, and they start at the very beginning during the talent acquisition process through onboarding.  During this time, they take an aggressive stance on hiring for organizational fit and engagement, and they don’t miss a beat during the early months of the employee’s tenure.

While the first weeks and months after hiring are certainly critical, the organization must remain focused on understanding the long-term engagement needs of the employee in the following months and years.  There must be ongoing effort to make work fun and interesting for all—this is part of having employees thrive in a productive environment.

Managers and leaders must continue to assess and address areas where they can provide a platform for each employee to grow and learn as they advance through the organization with increased responsibilities.  Training, coaching, and issuing challenging assignments are essential, as long as they align properly with the employee’s own interests, to maximizing productivity and eliminating concerns about retention.

Business Check-up Questions

1.       Do we understand why our peers and direct reports joined the organization?  Do we understand why they will leave?

2.       Are we proactive about employee turnover by taking a holistic approach and addressing turnover at the source – talent acquisition and onboarding?

3.       Do we enrich work roles and make work fun and interesting?

4.       Do we provide opportunities for personal growth and increased responsibilities through training, coaching and challenging assignments?  Is this based on each employee’s interests?

Next week, the TM Solutions Business Diagnostics Series will address the key area of Improving Expertise and Capabilities.

There are many ways to achieve success in business, and there are many models to follow, as you can see from the seventy-five thousand search results from amazon.com.  At TM Solutions, we believe that the core of any company’s success or failure is how they link strategy with their people.

What we’ve found in our many years of experience in analyzing what companies are doing right, as well as what they’re doing wrong, is that companies build a culture of excellence  by focusing on  four key areas:  strategy and planning, managing profitability, minimizing risk, and expertise and capabilities.

Strategy and Planning

Whether you’re a start-up, in growth mode, or mature, you should always act in a strategic manner and plan your success through your planning around your human resources—the people who drive your company’s success or cause it to lag in failure.  In order to plan effectively, you must take an introspective view of your company, asking the right questions to determine where you need change, what you need to start doing, stop doing, do more of, do less of. 

Do you understand what success factors drive performance excellence, as well as what factors are stagnating the organization?  Do your culture, values, and management objectives align with your overall business strategy? Are you attracting top talent consistently—as an “employer of choice”—or is your turnover at unacceptable levels?  Are your employees fully engaged in your business?  Do you understand why they join your organization, and more importantly, do you understand why they would leave? 

These are all questions that deserve some deep, inward searching in order to plan effectively for improvement over the near term as well as the next multi-year phase of your business.

Managing Profitability

Just as there are questions that can help to drive your company’s strategy and planning, ensuring that your people objectives are aligned with the overall strategic objectives of the business, there is a set of questions that can help to determine if your company is managing profitability  correctly.

With regard to your human capacity to meet your business objectives and customer needs, are you over capacity or under capacity?  Are there strategies in place to manage the costs of human resources? Does our talent management strategy allow you to scale up or down, as needed, to meet customer needs?  Is the organization maximizing employee productivity?  Are your company’s employees completely engaged with the company and its mission, driving productivity and customer satisfaction to highest possible levels?

The idea here is that companies should measure their performance not on the number of employees they have—often, the ones that do are incredibly bloated, inefficient, and, obviously, much less profitable—but rather how well they are meeting their main business objectives around revenues, expenses, and profitability, while ensuring to maintain the highest levels of employee engagement and productivity.  This balancing act creates a formula for long-term success—an operation that’s lean and mean in achieving results.

Minimizing Risk

Running a business, both large and small today, in today’s complex environment with limited or no focus on compliance and insurance presents significant risks in both time and money.  In addition to the potential costs, it can also distract key resources away from core business objectives. 

Do you understand what employment laws and regulations apply to your size business?  Are you fully compliant with current employment laws and regulations?  Are you compliant with all federal, state and local reporting and posting requirements?  Are your employees and independent contractors properly classified?  Do your policies align with organizational culture and strategy, and more importantly, are they up-to-date?  Do you currently have corporate legal counsel?

Conduct a basic compliance review to identify appropriate boundaries within employment law based on your organization’s size, industry and growth phase.  Additionally, an effective review evaluates how current management practices stack up to major risk areas as well as identify opportunities for improvement with your day-to-day-activities.  Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Expertise and Capabilities

A final foundational area for taking a look at how well your business is poised for future success is in the questioning and analysis of the aggregate and individual expertise and capabilities of your human capital.  You must question your company’s context within its competitive industry landscape, as well as take internal stock of your priorities with regard to your people.

Do you have the right talent in place to compete in today’s marketplace?  If so, how do you feel about your capabilities to meet challenges and customer demands in the years to come? Are you adequately staffed to execute operational and strategic plans?

A critical set of questions concerns your company’s ability, as mentioned in strategy and planning above, to be an “employer of choice” in order to have the highest levels of expertise and capabilities in its human capital. Do you have the ability to attract top talent?  If so, are you then actually hiring from the top 10 percent among available talent when you bring new people into the company?

Growing your expertise and capabilities isn’t just an external exercise in attracting top talent. It’s also about growing from within, ensuring that prioritizing and investing in professional development for your in-house talent. Are you utilizing professional development programs to maximize your leadership and coaching capabilities at executive and management levels?  Are your front-line people able to add to their expertise with continuing education in their respective skill areas, or flex into management positions by adding coaching skills to their already considerable capabilities in core job functions?

Conclusion

To arrive at the answers that are unique for your business, with regard to where you are with building a performance model for success, you need to ask the right questions. The truth is that there are a lot of right answers, based on the organizational culture and values, as well as your strategic goals and vision. In short, people define success in lots of different ways.

But once you have your own definition for success in place, you need to periodically ask yourself these questions around strategy and planning, managing profitability, minimizing risk, and expertise and capabilities.  What these questions, and their ongoing relevance in the life of a business, should illustrate to you is that your human capital needs are very fluid. Today’s highly competitive team can be too large and unequipped in its capabilities to meet tomorrow’s marketplace needs. Sometimes, you’re accomplishing much more with fewer people—obviously a desired outcome—and sometimes, trying to do too much without having enough or the right people on board to solve problems and achieve results is a fool’s errand.

There’s a fine line between success and failure, and the first thing you can do to walk on the right side of the line is to revisit these questions.

(RALEIGH, NC) TM Solutions, a human resources consulting organization that specializes in providing best practice consultation and customized talent management solutions, announces the launch of its breakthrough talent management software, the Mobile Manager.

The Raleigh, NC-based company’s Mobile Manager software unifies its suite of talent management solutions for business on a single online platform designed for today’s managers.  The new technology unifies TMSelect, the firm’s state-of-the-art talent management process, with training and development workshops to help managers and their employees achieve better results in the workplace.

Market changes, speed of technology, and “do-more-with-less” requirements of modern business have inspired TM Solutions’ executive team, led by President Rob Pulley, to develop the Mobile Manager.  According to Pulley, the greatest benefit of the Mobile Manager is that it causes a paradigm shift to meet these challenges, lifting businesses from the mire of traditional performance management.  “The Mobile Manager is the ultimate tool for companies looking for a boost as they change their cultures to compete in a tough marketplace,” stated Pulley. “Executives need to get away from the old performance management thinking and embrace a style built on the twin foundations of leadership and employee engagement.”

The Mobile Manager delivers a host of solutions aimed at meeting multiple company needs to benefit over the long haul. The software enables managers to streamline their talent management process, saving time and reducing costs. With built-in tools like the Talent Card and Peer Card, managers can turn human resources exercises into leadership development and team-building initiatives, resulting in better engagement, higher employee retention and optimized succession and expansion planning.

About TM Solutions

TM Solutions, LLC, founded in 2004, is an HR consulting organization that specializes in providing best practice consultation and customized talent management solutions.  Combining TMS Online, HR Store, TMSelect, Mobile Manager and Leadership Workshops with TMS OnDemand consultation services, TM Solutions helps clients attract and retain top talent while minimizing risk and reducing cost.  Innovative companies in North Carolina’s Research Triangle region turn to TM Solutions for talent management needs.

Media Contact

Rob Pulley, President

Phone:   (919) 325-1583

Email:  robpulley@tms-hr.com