The Optimal Workforce is engaged, effective, and possibly most important efficient. Employees are engaged with the culture and brand. They consistently add value to management and customers. They have a purpose and take pride in their work. Our workforce performance solutions can get things done with minimum of loss, waste, mistakes, and accidents.
What does it take to become an Optimal Workforce™?
It comes down to two simple factors – effectiveness and efficiency. Many companies are effective at what they make or services they provide. But very few are efficient. Whether it’s mismanagement of time, employee turnover, equipment downtime, or missed opportunities, inefficiencies force companies to work harder and run faster compared to competitors who are both effective and efficient.
How do you build The Optimal Workforce™?
The Optimal Workforce is built on the principle of optimizing
productivity. The best-in-class company marries the best and the brightest employees with state of the art technology. Automation isn’t considered exclusively as a means to produce more with fewer workers but a marriage between employees and technology. Automation is a synergistic relationship: employees feed and support technology, technology feeds and supports employees. The Optimal Workforce produces more with less. They do it consistently, effectively, and efficiently. Optimizing productivity is therefore a critical and competitive strategy for every company. It differentiates the best in class from the average performers. A lack of effectiveness and/or efficiency spells disaster for the mediocre and under-performers.
While many companies have done a pretty good job at optimizing productivity, especially with programs like Lean and Six Sigma, most have failed miserably at optimizing the workforce. And since every company depends on effective and efficient workers to maximize overall productivity, poor optimization of the workforce has crippled growth for many businesses. It has forced quite a few to close their doors.
The Optimal Workforce begins and ends with optimizing the workforce. Investing in technology without optimizing the workforce is like putting low octane fuel in a Formula One race care and expecting to win the race.
Optimizing the workforce begins with sourcing and recruiting the right applicants, hiring skilled workers with the right skills and abilities, placing them on the right teams, and doing it at the right time. While still far from meeting expectations, more and more companies are improving their hiring processes. From utilizing employee assessment tests to improving the behavioral interviewing skills of managers, companies are getting better at selecting high potential candidates and weeding out the ineffective ones.
But they ignore a critical factor, one which is undermining all the good intentions and efforts. Effectiveness is only part of the story in a competitive market. Efficiency is essential when consumers demand faster, cheaper, better and the competition is fiercely biting at your heels. For the laggards, the only chance they have to stay in the race and possibly catch up is to become both more effective and more efficient. Technology helps. But technology requires employee intervention, collaboration, and innovation.
Optimized productivity won’t happen without effective AND efficient workers.
To learn more about our workforce performance solutions, call us today at 800-803-4303.
The Optimal Workforce is a trademark of Poised for the Future Company and Success Performance Solutions.