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If ever there was a time that the world was changing fast, that time is now.  As hard as it may seem to believe given our current soupcon of pandemic induced chaos, there’s actually never been a better time to rethink your business plan or model and make a few changes and the best place to start mining new ideas – your workforce.

Effective leadership goes far beyond knowing how to manage your employees and includes topics of conversation around how inclusive your teams are in decision making and what ideas they have to contribute beyond “business as usual”.

So to fully understand how to unleash the hidden potential of your workforce, we need to reverse engineer a few processes first.

KNOW WHO YOUR PEOPLE ARE.

In a top ten type of guide, this one fact should be repeated at least 5 times and the best way to start, is to interview your team from scratch – but this time, instead of recruiting for an available position, interview them as if you were interviewing them for their dream job, and tell them that that’s what you’re doing.

This is an easy and informal way to find out all the hidden talent that your team has.  Remember that you recruited them for a specific role, but that hardly means that that’s all they’re able to offer and if they haven’t been contributing at full tilt – that’s an internal conversation well worth having.

KNOW WHAT YOUR PEOPLE CAN DO – BUT AREN’T DOING NOW (AND WHY).

Linked to the previous point, once you’ve reinterviewed your team you should have a clearer idea of what it is that they do currently and what they potentially could contribute over and above what they’re already doing.  This is a real-time method of identifying gaps in skills or areas of “overqualification” and it’s an exciting way to design a career path towards promotion.  You get all the additional skills and intellectual contributions without a brand new recruitment drive and your team member gets a new job.  Then, ask yourself and your managers – why?  This is a non-confrontational and blameless exercise. the point is to grow.

DON’T JUST RECOGNIZE TOP PERFORMERS – REWARD THEM.

It’s time to go back to the drawing board as far as employee incentives are concerned.  Meet your team members “where they’re at” and incentivize based on career and life goals.  It’s seldom a good idea to incentivize with cash, at least not when you’re hoping to achieve long-term effects.

DO YOU REALLY VALUE DIVERSITY?

Study upon study has shown that increased diversity in your workforce almost always leads to increased profits and that’s a great motivator, but it should not be the sole motivator of encouraging and supporting a diverse workforce.  Society has changed and is changing ever more yet and companies all over the globe are seeking out organisations that value achieving growth through shared values and this increasingly means supporting and growing your diversified workplace and if you can’t do it internally, then seek out HR support from Syndeo to get you the expert guidance you need to achieve this goal and more.

Remember that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and you can make sure that no one in your team is the weak link.