Evaluating Your Construction Staff Before Hiring New Employees
I read this past week that employment rates may be slower to rise due to the fact that employees have become more productive. I assume these analysts mean more productive due to layoffs and that fewer employees are expected to get more done. Employees are doing just that, mostly because anyone with a job is just happy to have one and scared of losing the one he/she has.
Some of this increase in productivity may be due to investing in technology, some may be due to the fact that people are working a lot more overtime and some may be due to the fact that some businesses were overstaffed before the recession hit.
Businesses are slow to rehire after a recession. If you have had to lay off staff or not replace staff lost due to normal attrition, you tend to be hesitant to build that staff back for fear of starting the process all over again.
If you are in a position of trying to decide to hire again, take the time to evaluate what your current staff is doing. Can you use outside employment/labor services to assist you in the busier times and avoid increasing full-time year-round staff? Do you even know what your staff is doing? Work on your organizational chart, and write out new job descriptions for your staff.
During this very tough business atmosphere, you may have stretched people thin with little thought of what assignments and responsibilities were being assigned where. People just took up the slack, with no consideration of strengths and long-term employee or business growth. And you may think that if work is getting done, then what’s the point of hiring? The work may be getting done, but is it getting done the most efficient way? Sometimes one smart new hire can pay for hiscompensation and put profit on the bottom line in a very short amount of time.
Is your business now organized and positioned for maximizing long-term growth? As business begins to pick up, truly evaluate how the workload is allocated, and rework those systems and job descriptions with a forward-thinking approach.
You may well not want to do things the way you used to do them, but you will always need the right people on the right jobs to build your business.
Tags: Add new tag, Company Organization, Hiring
