Helping Employees Succeed
If a company has really important and sizable goals that it
wishes to attain, it needs to help the employees succeed in what they do so
that the firm can be successful, in turn, in reaching their goals.
There is really just ONE thing that the company needs to do:
provide adequate resources for their employees to succeed.
Obviously, resources are always scarce and an employee can
ask for a billion dollar budget but it may not be feasible. However, there are
some important things that an employer must provide in order to assist their
employees to be successful.
Tools
Employees require appropriate tools to function efficiently
in their role. For example, a graphic designer needs suitable desktop
publishing software to do their job properly. Some companies want to scrimp on supplying
proper tools and what happens is that employees lose productivity with
workarounds to get their job done. It’s not always impossible, but it’s
inefficient and frustrating for the employees. This can affect employee
retention.
Manpower
Depending on the workload, some times more manpower is
required to do the job in time or better. Lack of manpower can cause employees
to be overworked and make mistakes. Mistakes causes work to be re-done which
increases cost or may cause customers to be very unhappy with the end product.
This affects the output quality and brand of the firm. During down times,
companies tend to want to shave down the payroll and squeeze more out of
employees. This is fine if there is fat to be trimmed. However, if it is done
just to save money as a long term strategy, overworked employees will
eventually depart, causing the balance of those in the team to be REALLY overworked
and everything at that point can fall apart when the rest of the employee team
leaves in droves. This strategy is short-sighted and unsustainable. It is best
to monitor the quality of work and workload to determine if manpower investment
needs to be made by the firm so that the employees can succeed and do well for
the firm.
Budget
It takes money to make money. Almost all companies large and
small find that the budget is tight and everyone wishes for a more liberal one.
However, there are certain floors whereby budgets should not fall below. When
they do, it becomes a futile effort for the employees attempting to pursue
company goals that cannot be attained with woefully inadequate budget resources.
Asking the impossible from an employee does not help them succeed. Either the
goals or the budget have to be readjusted. Otherwise, the employee is set up
for failure and no employee wants to be in that situation.
With an adequate budget, the company can provide the
employees appropriate tools and manpower to succeed. So ultimately, it boils
down to making sure that the budget does not fall so low that it is below a
minimum threshold to be effective for the firm.
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