Is you age Important when Job Hunting?

Age discrimination is an ever growing topic due to the relative health of older generations. With less manual labour undertaken it is unlikely that by the age of 60 you could not continue with the duties of your and if you live to 80 then you will have only worked for half your life. How can you ensure that your age does not become a factor when you are seeking employment later in life or as the result of a redundancy?

Change and Adapt

One of the biggest complaints of older generations in the workplace is their inability to adapt to change, perhaps having been in the company so long they believe they know everything or know what's best but often they are much more likely to progress if they change and adapt with the role they are in. The older generation of today grew up in a time without technology, they are in competition for jobs with people who had computer lessons at school and new technology to them is simply like changing your clothes daily. This is a worry for the older generation who take longer to learn the necessary skills when technology is involved but with good training it needn't present a problem. There is a wealth of free to use computer courses and you may find your local area has drop in centers to help you get more in touch with technology, it is well worth investing the time as everything becomes more and more digital. Even if you know the basics there are shortcuts, tips and tricks which can really boost your productivity.

Set realistic earning expectations

When looking for a job later in life it is easy to expect that your experience will get you some kind of premium, in most cases it will get you a higher starting wage but not by much. The recruitment market is a buyers market so the employer will have cost at the forefront of their mind, with such varied competition you may need to accept a lower starting wage. If you ensure they have a good progression plan to move up the salary bandings then this should not worry you as proving your worth you will quickly gain higher pay.


Do not hide your age

In many industries its common place to lie about your age. Take for example the case of the actress Huong Hoang who tried to sue IMDB for publishing her age, which eventually ended in the case being dismissed as there was no proof she had been the victim of age discimination. Of course the irony of that story is that by making an issue of her age she probably simply publicised it more than it would have been noticed had she not bothered. Age should not be something you have to hide so do not be tempted to chop a few years off in the hope it will help, be up front about your longeviety of career, there is no reason that if you are 50 that you will not be at the company just as long as someone who is 20, the average length of time in any role is around 3 years and within a company is now below 10 years. The days of career for life are long gone and this has helped the older job hunters enourmosly.


Most companies when recruiting have to appear to not discriminate based on age, however certain aspects of your ability may be questioned and you need to be able to prove you can do the job advertised. The biggest barrier to employment in old age is not your age it's your skills so go out there and learn something new it will help.

Identifying Talent

Talent development is the best way to ensure you company has a pipeline of promising staff that are both engaged and skillful to help you grow and improve. Whilst buying in talented people can be effective the identification and promotion of talent internally has a ripple effect across your organisation to help incentivise staff and improve morale. If others see that there are clear career paths open to them they will be more productive and demonstrate the types of behaviors that you wish to promote.

One of the best ways of identifying talent is to use the 9 box Matrix system of categorising employees. This should not be done in secret but be a very open and honest discussion between manager and employee.

The 9 box matrix contains different areas which determine two factors, their performance and their potential. Each employee is positioned in a box, best to keep this simple as some people like to have the position within the box as a factor.

Firstly the manager and employee should mark where they would place the employee, it can often lead to disagreements but it is good to identify and address some behavioural observations that have been made about the employee. It can also mean that perhaps the manager assumes something about the employee.

Most businesses need a large number of employees in boxes 2,5,6 and 3 who have acceptable or high performance but have little or no potential to move forward. This is not to say they could not be trained to do a higher grade position but it means they perhaps do not wish to progress as they enjoy their job or their job is in an area where promotion may not be possible unless a new skill was developed. But these people will always be the bedrock of any success by ensuring the work is done well.

Those in box 1 should be actively managed out of the business. They would have been identified as lacking the requisite skills for the role and all training interventions undertaken have not improved the situation. If this box is used frequently in your organisation then you may wish to determine the length of service of those falling into this category as it could point to a deficiency with your recruitement process and if the process is outsourced to agents can be used to give direct feedback to those agencies to help improve future joiners.

Those in box 4 and 7 should be moved out of this box within 6 months or fall into box 1. This can be done by targeting training to their particular deficiency. It may also be wise to provide a mentor to those in box 7 as they will be a valuable asset should their current performance improve.

Boxes 8, 9 and 6 are those that should fill any job vacancies at higher positions and providing working groups and mentors will help to keep their ideas fertilised until an opportunity present itself.

One final thing to consider during this classification is that on a micro level it is often difficult to identify how the individual would move to the next box so ensure your management are clear on how the path to the next box whether that be vertical or horizontal is achieved. On a macro level this grid will give you great insight into your organisation and working on percentages can really tell you if you have a good workforce or if perhaps more should be done with training or engagement. A box with more employees to the left should identify overall training deficiencies and a box with more to the bottom will identify a problem with staff engagement.

Impact of Redundancy on Workforce

In the current economic times it is often difficult to ensure that staff stay motivated and productive. An increase in absence levels in due to Stress and anxiety has been sited as a direct result of the economic pressure being felt across the economy which in turn adds pressure to employees to work harder, faster and smarter. Dealing with change in an organisation is valueable skill and often one which is purchased from consultancy firms to address. Independent consultancy firms are seem as less emotionally attached to the company and therefore they can provide the impartial advice around how to best restructure.

Unfortunately large organisations go through peaks and troughs of redundancy programmes and recruitment campaigns and against the backdrop of difficult financial times many employees lose their job. Looking at the impact on the affected individuals is perhaps the main focus and rightly so but do companies pay enough attention to the knock on effect of this?

Legislation

Legislation in employment is strigent, difficult to navigate and often leads to very interesting situations which can damage the attitudes of the remaining workforce. A large organisation does not have the flexibility to simply move resource around and often has a recruitment campaign as a result of a redundancy programme. This would seem crazy, as you are losing the skills you wish to retain and having to go to the employment market to buy in new skills, which will not be effective for at least 3 months (average time employee takes to become productive in a new job). This is due to the terms of reference of a job and the clearly defined legislation that exists to ensure that employees are treated fairly, you may not change the majority of an employees role without having to displace and reinterview them for the new position. This can also be triggered during a company buy out or merger. The two existing sets of staff having completely different role profiles and responsibilities. Legislation is more difficult the more documented an organisation becomes, so with all the protection a role profile will offer the company and individual it can also be the hurdle which makes the employee lose their job or the organisation lose a valuable asset.

Managing change

The morale of many employees at risk, of redundancy or having been selected to be made redundant with a notice period of 3-6 months, is often low which means that you have a risk in your business that needs to be managed closely, sensitively and without prejudice. If they become dissengaged this can have a knock on effect to other members of the organisation, cause friction amongst co-workers who have to pick up any slack in the workload and put pressure on managers who are under qualified to deal with emotional issues. Managing change is an entire industry and there are ways to ensure engagement levels remain high until the exit date, ensuring the employee feels included without enforced participation in irrelevant meetings and ensuring the impact on the wider workforce is minimalised through clarity around the reasoning and next steps of any redundancy. Some companies prefer to purchase external consultants to come in and provide this clear direction to their managers and hopefully educate their management pool for any future issues that can arise.

Garden leave

As a last resort often companies will pay the employee to not be at work, instead having others do their activity and allowing the employee to refresh their CV and work on skills for a career move. This is not preferred as it can send out a negative message about that employee and cause friction which may be difficult with any future dealings. In large companies it is never a good idea to burn bridges as they may well be back one day to help the business again. Garden leave is difficult and expensive to manage and therefore would only be if the negative impact on the business or the individual was such that the subsequent cost was worth it.

Good Leavers

A good leaver is always a good sign, and through continued dialogue can be acheived easily. With many large organisations it is worth discussing future opportunities and the impact the last few months will have on any future employment with the company. Employees will know that in today's world a career is no longer a 40 year sentence at the same company but a smaller collection of roles which add to their diversified CV and experience. So the likelyhood of them coming back to a company is higher than ever before. Also ensuring that the management recognise the effort against a backdrop of a difficult event is a good tool to ensure the employee remains engaged.

Does Social media harm your productivity?

Many large companies invest money in IT programmes that block certain websites from use, pretty much any website you have to log in to will be blocked. This seems like a sensible approach at first glance to ensure employees don't just update facebook all day and tweet what their having for lunch but social media is evolving and many high tech and more technology savvy businesses actively encourage the use of social media.

For many types of work there are professional groups on most social media sites which can help the productivity of business. For example often when doing a presentation, creating a spreadsheet or even just trying to figure out how to change something in a word processor it is quicker to be able to access a group and tap into the knowledge of thousands of other industry professionals for advice and support. Whilst Google is great for guides and a simple search query can often eventually find an answer to your particular problem, the time lost trawling through the thousands of entries to find your exact example can be time consuming.

So here are some best practice to allow access to social media whilst ensuring misuse is not promoted:

- Be clear with your employees; explain social media should be used for helping them with any issues they come across to improve both their skills and the efficiency of the tasks they are undertaking.
- Do your homework and find out which sites you may want to grant access to, twitter may not be the best for a programmer but LinkedIn could be ideal to provide them with access to a technical community.
- Empower employees to be responsible; remember by putting in place strict rules and regulations this can harm the overall engagement of the office and make employees feel alienated from your company.
- Begin an internal social network; this can be a place to share best practice and provide cross team collaboration and development which is free and often more useful than scripted external training providers.

And remember if misuse happens then you can deal with that through the appropriate disciplinary procedures. The time taken to address misuse will certainly be less than the time saved by allowing employees to gain useful information to assist them with their job.

Written by
Steven Hill

Manpower planning during a recession

During the recent reccession that is so publicly discussed on news websites, radio and in pubs up and down the land there has been a decline in turnover of staff in most companies. This has meant that the manpower planning undertaken could lead to a higher provision for recruitment and training costs than previously planned. There are both advantage and disadvantages to this for many companies:

Advantages
- Lower turnover means quality of output should improve as more experienced staff are in situ
- A reduction in time gap between leaver and joiner with any checks and training required
- Reduction in complaints when client has to deal with a different employee each time.

Disadvantages
- If there is a headcount reduction required this means that redundancy may need to be considered
- Cost of employees that have been with the company will be higher than new entrants meaning overall wage bill may offset any savings on recruitment process

Unforseen Disadvantages
- If employees are forced to stay due to poor local job market they may infect the rest of your team with negativity. This drives down engagement of the staff and can harm productivity
- More time may be spent dealing with absence and disciplinary issues with staff that do not want to be in the job anymore but have no option.
- Talent pools can stagnate with no fresh new ideas and enthusiasm coming in from external environments sharing best practices

Potential solutions:
- Invest time in engagement, staff get togethers and social activities.
- Have team building days which foster a feeling of teamwork, collaboration and creative thinking.
- Provide an open forum to address any employee concerns and address issues before they escalate.
- Look out for the signs of poor engagement and negativity and stop them before they affect other staff.

Unfortunately during difficult economic times the first thing to be cut back on is staff engagement and team building which often leads to an ever downward spiral until the economy recovers and jobs begin to move freely again.

Written by
Steven Hill

Surveys, why and how?

In the context of Resource Planning it is often good to regularly check up the activity of your workforce and when it is on a non captured platform then a survey is a great way of doing this.

Surveys are simple and one common example would be to format an excel document to list the times on the left hand column and ask them to enter in the activity they were doing over at least a one week period so you can analyse any intra day and daily fluctuations. If you have a small workforce then free formatted text is ok as you can spend the time manually configuring the information however to save time and also for larger groups you can specifically set the paramters of the entry by using an index key. The index key will list usually in categories the general types of activity you wish your workforce to be doing and one other category with a free format text box at the bottom to explain. This will mean you can simply copy and paste the data into a database and quickly get stats around the activity undertaken in your business.

Step 1:
Set up excel template with times (usual working times with some leeway either side e.g. 9 to 5 you should allow entry between 8.00am and 6.00pm)

Step 2:
Set up an index key for the types of work you wish to capture, you can list as many categories as you want but do not over complicate as it will then be counter productive to fill in and give you less meaningful results.

Once you have the template you can then send to employees and await the responses. There are further ways to automate this process:

- Use conditional formatting to highlight any areas not completed
- Use VBA to automate a return to a specified inbox at the click of a button
- Use VBA to collate all your responses into one database.

Please contact author for information on these further steps or any information around personalising this template

Written by
Google Steven Hill

Organisational Structure and Spans of Control

When a business begins the management structure is simple, one person does everything. As it expands it becomes more complex as you layer employees then your time spend managing those employees grows, with payroll queries, issues, reviews, etc. Then if you continue to grow you delegate this to middle manager who acts as a span breaker, and once it becomes so large you may even divide the work into departments. This is when companies usually go wrong.

If you follow a management principle from the start of say 1 manager manages 6 people this should be carried forward and in fact it is actually easier to manage managers as generally you can be more relaxed that they are doing a fine job so your spans could increase. Most companies work counter intuitive to this and have less spans the higher up the organisation you go and a lot of Multi Nationals end up with spans that shrink during a recession. The problem is that often during any kind of project to reduce your workforce and improve your capacity it is so easy to forget the additional benefits this efficiency will save you. I will illustrate below in a case study example:

Company 1

This company has 100 retail stores around the UK and currently employees managers on spans of 1:5 in most of it stored having 3 managers and one overall manager. They introduce a new stock management system meaning that they no longer require any time to do a stock check in the evenings, saving them 6fte per store (fte = full time equivalent). The original 6 saving is accompanied by the reduction of 1 manager and the total saving is then calculated on the basis of these 7 staff. Perhaps there is a selection process where staff are pooled to identify those at risk or the turnover is high enough to manage down the staffing number over time.

The lost opportunity here is the saving you have made on 1 of the other managers only now managing 4 people and the overall manager now managing 2 managers. This would be an additional saving that most companies would say is not realisable due to the fact you cannot get rid of part of a person. Wrong, if you are going to the effort of implementing a new system then surely its little effort to also do analysis of the roles and adjust them accordingl;
- Could the overall manager take on some more senior direct employees thus saving you a new manager
- Could you look at other time saving methods to reduce the management time required?


However, if you do remove another of the managers you end up with a strange structure or different levels reporting into the same person, but in practice this is not an issue as long as you have the correct people in the job. You still have the same career path as before.

Too often there are efficiencies made during a recession that affect the 'front line' of a business with little affect on the middle or senior management, when in fact this is your biggest cost. I can't say i have ever been into any company and thought, wow i wish there was more managers around, but i often think I wish there was more front line staff to serve or help me.

Written by
Google Steven Hill

Idle time: Why should we pay for it?

One of the main complaints of any employer is the productivity of their employees. Some of the largest companies spend thousands of hours and huge sums of money to try and understand their employees and what motivates them best. Even the most intense interview process will not always ensure the right candidate is in the job. Being an employer means that you have to accept that everyone is and individual, the larger the company the more difficult this becomes so you have to create general rules and guidance to staff and their managers to say what is and is not deemed acceptable for performance.

Sales targets are one way that companies ensure they get their bang for the buck but what if you dont work in a sales driven environment how can you measure productivity. What if the output is not determined by quantity of words written or emails sent? Well productivity can usually be measured backwards by setting an expectation of what amount of time is acceptable to be away from your work, Idle time.

The main component of idle time is Lunch breaks, the standard given is an hour which for many employees is too much at one time and prefer shorter 15 minute breaks in morning and afternoon with only half hour break at lunch time. There are many ways to divide this up. There is then toilet breaks and you cannot begin to track that as its both distasteful but can also be deemed as discriminatory to those with specific toilet requirements. Here are some example ways companies can track idle time:

Clock in - Clock out

In telephony units when the agents telephone is set to idle this tracks total time spent on that selection. On most basic aspect and other brand telephony equipment you can set specific keys to determine if employee is on call, idle, break etc. This is the most accurate and can be targetted to say 10% average over a week and any excess to that will highlight as a potential problem and can be addressed.
For non telephony based employers you can also have a clock in and out system, whether it be a computer, till or hole punch on the wall. This is all a way to determine where your staff are and what they are doing right now.

Manager Observation

This is unfortunately the most difficult to manage and costly as you need to spend time observing your staff. Certain things are true about human nature, when being observed you are always more likely to do things correctly than if you are left to your own devices when shortcuts can become appealing. Also when you are not busy you make the work stretch to fit the time you wish it to. Have you ever been into a bank on a busy day, the teller works quickly to serve and move to next customer, however if queue is only small and they don't want to have to move onto other non teller activity they may provoke more conversation from customers to avoid having to move away from the front of house thus making the work fit the time. The other element to managerial observation is very difficult to approach a member of staff and say i think you could go faster without damaging their confidence and potentially having a reverse effect.

Self Assessment

By far the best solution is to have a system with allows the employee to enter in their own shift pattern throughout the day. this means that the employee is giving an accurate reflection of what activity they have been doing throughout the day, this can be done using a simple excel sheet and can be capture using drop down boxes at 30 minute or even 15 minute intervals. With engagement of staff being critical to the smooth running of a business allowing this manual keying means you are empowering staff to take the initiative and often you will find the results remarkably honest. When an employee can see they have not been perhaps as productive as they can be they will often approach you for extra duties and tasks to ensure they can successfully fill their day. By putting their activity down in writing it often bring to life just how long they are perhaps spending on activity that should be quicker, it can also help you identify efficiency savings in your business practices.

For more details on this solution please contact the author

Written by
Steven Hill
Steve@vinylpuppet.com

Google

The Principles of Resource Planning

Resource Planning sounds like a simple concept. To ensure that you have the right people in the right place at the right time. But if it was that simple your entire workforce would have 100% productivity and engagement. Even in a small business, retail unit, call centre or manufacturer there are so many variables that you need to predict. Now you may be considering paying a company thousands to help you with this, or you just rely on everyone trying their best, but you do need to consider this and you don't need to spend huge sums of money doing it.

Some simple basics for Resource Planning:

Know your workflow

Retail - spend a week capturing the number of customers coming into your shop, doesnt have to be exact. Also if you have a till roll with time stamp this will show when customers purchased things so just enter into a spreadsheet.
Call centre - use your call log sheet to show the arrival rate of calls, ensuring it is when they called and not when you answered, if you have call waiting technology.
Manufacturer - log when each item is produced ideally both start and end times.

When are your staff available

This is the amount of employees you have in your business at any one time.

e.g. of datasheet now created

With this information you can do a quick analysis to determine what wastage there is and then amend your shift patterns or workflow accordingly. Now one thing to remember is that in a customer driven business you cannot amend the arrival rate as that is determined by other peoples decision making of when they wish to use your service, however you can encourage them to a more suitable time. e.g. A coffee shop is busy between lunch hours of 12 till 2pm. There is a customer who comes in everyday at 12.30 and waits to order 3 sandwiches for the hairdressers along the road. This customer could, call ahead and you could do the making of the sandwiches prior to 12 saving both you and the customer time.

The best way to determine the fit of your plan is to graph your customers/workflow against your available staff

You can see there is some disconnect between arrival patterns and available employees. This would highlight when certain tasks like stock check, cleaning, reviews, back office activity, etc could be completed during less busy times. Alternatively it could show you when you are overstaffed and allow you to reduce your wage bill by removing some hours.

This is a quick excercise to determine how well your current Resource Planning is working.

Written by Steven Hill

Google