Under-Employment

By: Bruce Renton,
Champion Builder
Champions in the Workplace, Calgary
August 2008

Under-employment is a leak that can be plugged: Discover three ways to solve the challenge of filling job vacancies

Under-employment can be defined as the condition of not fully utilizing the talents and skills of employees. Business management often looks for fresh talent outside the organization when the right people are actually in their own backyard. An employee who has an excellent job fit may have become emotionally disengaged and, as a result, is working significantly below potential. Companies could avoid hiring more people and in some cases even trim staff by attracting and retaining the right people. The three steps below suggest ways to fill jobs without expanding your employee base.

Getting the right people

The first step is attracting and retaining the right people. In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins describes the value of getting the right people on the bus. An employer may already have the right people on the bus and not realize it… that is, not without creating opportunities to discover. This story illustrates a typical example. A business owner learned during a casual conversation that a production laborer in his company had computer-aided design expertise. Performing such tasks had often pulled the owner away from higher payoff activities and robbed him of family time. As the skills were needed only intermittently, he contracted the employee to do the job after hours. It became a win-win situation as the employee made more money, had job flexibility and used more of his talents, which in turn led to greater job satisfaction.

Many executives agonize over whether they are making the right hiring decision or if an existing employee is actually the best fit. Use of personality assessments, available through internet- based service providers, can help to identify the most effective contender for a given job, saving both time and money. They also help decision-makers remain objective and can confirm hunches. Unfortunately assessment reports are often never seen by the employee – a lost opportunity since the employee may not know where improvement is needed or, in some cases, may not realize that the job fit just isn’t there. Assessments take some of the burden off the decision-maker and put it between the two parties: here are the facts, what should we do about it?

Developing champions, one at a time

Step two is to develop employees’ people or ‘soft’ skills. Not everyone brings those skills with them to the workplace but they are critical to business growth. These include: maintaining a positive attitude despite challenges with people and environment; adjusting from being a worker to becoming a leader; encouraging workers to follow planned systems; managing people with a variety of personalities; dealing with conflicts and misunderstandings; establishing accountability and consequences for not meeting performance expectations; honing coaching and training skills; above all, developing the ability to listen and ask effective questions.

Daniel Coleman, in his book, Emotional Intelligence, states that having these soft skills is the dominant factor for success in life (and business). Most people want to do a good job, but without the proper people skills an employee may become the next job vacancy, either because of personal job dissatisfaction or as a result of uncomplimentary direct reports.

Building self-reliant teams

The final step is to offload tasks from middle and senior managers so that they can concentrate on higher payoff activities. Usually frontline staff wants career or job challenges and more opportunity, but when talents or opinions are ignored they shut down emotionally. There is a process to building teams that is easy and inexpensive.

In a story about a horse-pulling contest, a suggestion was made to see how much the winner and runner-up teams could pull together. The result was that the combined teams pulled almost 30% more weight than the individual teams. In business, it’s possible for even emerging teams of five to seven to do the work of ten. What people are telling me is that they value peer support more than encouragement from managers. Compatible team members want each other to succeed and often understand the solutions to problems better than management. Building self-directed and loyal teams will cause productivity to climb.

Do you need to hire more people, or do you need to hire and develop more of the right people? With personalized development and building extraordinary teams using simple and inexpensive methods, the leak of productivity and talent through under-employment can be plugged and tapped.

Bruce

Source of Horse Pulling story:

* Pat Williams's book "The Magic of Teamwork", also found in
* The Baseball Coaching Bible, Edited by Jerry Kindall and John Winkin, published 2000, ISBN:0736001611