Today’s business environment is extremely competitive, and technological advancements are making it harder and harder to stay in the game every day. Although technology once gave more profitable organisations an advantage, things like computers and the internet are now readily available to everyone. Advanced marketing techniques can be utilised with the smallest investments, meaning that there’s little risk to many of these strategies. All of this means that the company at the top of your industry could end up near the bottom in just a matter of months or years if they aren’t constantly working to innovate.
Innovation Happens Everywhere
Innovation is crucial to the success of any modern business. Without it, a rapid development in the market could lead to widespread consumer adoption, making your product or service completely useless to the end-user. It’s important to be continuously developing new products and services, and to look for opportunities to create new revenue streams, but this isn’t the only way that businesses can and should innovate.
Innovation needs to happen all the time, throughout the entirety of an organisation. It’s not enough for investors to see a steady stream of profits, as they need to see growth, and while this may seem greedy, the truth is that even if your profits are the same year over year, if your competitors are growing their sales, your market position is actually shrinking. However, product development, sales, marketing, and research departments need a lot of support if they are to be successful. Proper management of your staff is critical, and without it, your product development teams won’t be able to create products, your research teams won’t be able to find new revenue streams or product categories, your sales teams won’t be able to carve out a niche, and your marketing teams won’t be able to reach your customers. If people in your organisation aren’t managed properly, you can’t succeed.
This is true because, unfortunately, people haven’t really been raised to function as professionals. Most people have a difficult time separating work relationships from ordinary friendships, and this alone can create problems. Beyond that, however, people are extremely complex, and every one of your employees is different. Regardless of how old or young an employee is, they will need to be coached, mentored, disciplined, and motivated, and if they aren’t, employees will leave, and new ones will be hard to attract. It may sound daunting, but your human resources department is responsible for managing all of this. That should put things into perspective, but in order to assist you in understanding just how important their jobs are, it’s important to understand each of these pieces on its own.
Recruitment
Like it or not, you’re going to need to hire on a nearly continual basis. While this is expensive, it’s entirely necessary for a healthy organisation. If you’re growing, or have the goal of growing, you’re going to need to do better work at a higher volume than you are now, and that means that you’re going to need to be able to attract talent. What makes your organisation special that would help you attract better talent than your competitors? That may be a hard question to answer, but it’s something that your human resources department will probably need to figure out. While you’re sure to hire some talented individuals at one point or another, if you can’t make your organisation seem truly unique, that is, if you don’t have something special to offer to the best minds in the industry, you’ll have greater difficulty reaching your goals. Recruitment is a major cornerstone in any great human resources department, and it’s something that can be taught in human resources management courses. This is just one great reason to consider getting your employees professionally trained in human resources job duties.
Training
There are two major responsibilities that your human resources department has when it comes to training; onboard training, and ongoing education. For the former, when a brand new employee walks through the door on their first day, they need to be taught how to do their job. Even if they’ve worked in the field for ten years, they’ll likely need to be brought up to speed on the software that you use, or at the very least, on the way that you like to do things. In order for them to be truly valuable to you, they need to know exactly how to work with you towards your goals. No matter how you slice it, on-board training is simply a training element that you can’t live without, and depending on the size of your organisation, it could be an extremely heavy burden on your HR department if they don’t have formal instruction on how to properly train employees. If employees don’t understand their jobs quickly, they’ll become frustrated, and they’ll leave. Even if they don’t leave on their own, if they can’t eventually understand their jobs, they’ll have to be replaced.
As for the latter, even if none of your employees ever moved onto another job in your company, they’re going to need ongoing education. Software and operating systems are updated, and innovations will happen in the industry requiring you to adapt in order to keep pace. Even if those things don’t happen, people can almost always improve their methods and thus become better at their job through the proper use of training.
Workplace Atmosphere and Morale
Retaining employees is just as critical as hiring new ones. Most companies struggle to keep their employees today, and the reasons for this are complex. While there are some things that you just can’t fix, there are many other opportunities to better each and every company in existence today which could help them retain more of their talent. Simply put, you need to be able to keep your employees happy without offering them things that you can’t afford. While there are certainly employees that wish to leave because they dislike their jobs or their pay, many of these employees will stay with your company for other reasons. It’s important to understand how to do this if you are going to make progress in your industry.
