The job market has always been a fluid medium, but with the digital economy opening up global pools of talent and resources, new personnel are joining or leaving enterprises at more frequent intervals, as fresh opportunities and challenges present themselves.
For business organizations, it’s now a fact of life that the workforce will be in a continual state of flux – a situation in which it may prove difficult to achieve stability and consistency in output or service delivery.
But with a revolving workforce, how is it possible to maintain the levels of productivity needed for commercial success? Here are some recommendations for doing just that.
Be Clear About What’s Expected
A sense of aimlessness and general dissatisfaction results when workers don’t know what’s expected of them, or feel that their skills aren’t being called upon.
You can reduce this effect by identifying which workers are best suited to which jobs – and assigning tasks in ways that will best expose their plus points, or challenge them in ways that excite and engage.
Give Them The Tools They Need
Besides physical infrastructure, you’ll need to provide the digital and communications tool-sets that your workers require to effectively do their jobs.
With a hosted VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) solution incorporating Unified Communications (UC), you can offer a full gamut from enhanced call and message-handling with presence panels, through to the integration of office productivity software, multimedia, and business-specific web platforms.
Provide Encouragement And Reward
You don’t necessarily have to make a game out of it, but a system of incentive and reward can instill a sense of healthy competition, ambition, and achievement in your workers. This can be for their general performance, or more task and project-specific accomplishments and goals.
Segregate Business From Personal
Productivity suffers when personal matters intrude into the business realm. A cloud-hosted telecoms solution empowers the enterprise to enforce a stricter segregation of business from personal data – and enables workers to maintain separate phone, voicemail, messaging, and email accounts for work and home.
Provide A Feedback Loop
Maintaining an open and accessible channel of communication between workers and management offers a number of advantages.
A hosted phone solution allows for real-time dissemination of information to the workforce. Real-time chat, video conferencing, and collaboration tools empower workers to communicate with their peers and supervisors, and facilitate the completion of ongoing projects.
In addition, these communication tools allow for easier performance assessment, and provide an opportunity for workers to relay their opinions and comments on matters they perceive in the workplace – a real boon in judging attitudes to the company and the mission, and flagging potential issues that might lead to employees seeking opportunities elsewhere.
Provide Training And Skills Acquisition
Taking the time and trouble to prepare formalized programs of training and skills acquisition enables the business to communicate its own vision of how things should be done, and provides workers with a chance to gain new knowledge and skills.
“Cross training” (providing schemes that impart skills used in various divisions of the enterprise) also gives workers and managers the option of rotating duties, and allows for the easier substitution of workers with comparable skill-sets, if some of their colleagues are sick or absent.
A hosted phone solution provides many of the tools required for easy dissemination of training materials, digital content, and notifications. If you’d like to know more about how hosted telecommunications can improve the productivity of your workers, contact the experts at net2phone.