Are you making full use of your workforce - EmployeeConnect Blog
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Are you making full use of your workforce?

Every employee needs to be as effective as they can if businesses want to operate at full capacity. This allows all staff to feel valued while encouraging productivity and growth.

However, this involves much more than just the personal side of a workforce, as available resources need to be maximised as well. The changing face of the digital workplace is providing challenges to businesses in this area, with some struggling to effectively integrate new software solutions with existing practices.

Where should I focus?

It’s important to focus on the needs of your staff as they are directly responsible for the success of your business. In particular, millennials are bringing unique requirements to businesses, including different desires and aims for the future.

Employers need to acknowledge these traits in order to avoid alienating an entire demographic through poor workplace policy and processes.

The 2015 Deloitte Millennial Survey discovered the extent to which this was shaping the employment landscape, and found this group is having a significant influence on trends in this area.

One of the major considerations for employees is millennial’s approach to leadership, with the survey finding that they often believe business leaders are operating in a manner that is inconsistent with how they think the company should be run.

Deloitte refers to this as a “leadership gap” as it is a discrepancy between two different influential parties within a business. Up to 75 per cent of millennials surveyed believe businesses focus on their own needs ahead of those of wider society.

The most worrying statistic to emerge from the report, however, is that only 28 per cent of millennials believe their business is making full use of their skills. For employers, this is a significant amount of potential that is going unused.

So what can they do?

Embrace digital

A lot of the skills companies are struggling to effectively utilise digital business as new technologies are proving disruptive in these environments. Research firm Gartner is encouraging companies to create “business moments” to connect the dots.

“The emergence of a “business moment” is the result of the emergence of digital business,” explained Vice President Betsy Burton.

“A business moment exploits the connection of people, business and things and allows companies to innovate for entirely new scenarios.”

Companies can also encourage science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills in the workplace to achieve a similar effect. The Office of the Chief Scientist found the 345 of the 486 employers surveyed believed that staff with these skills were the most innovative within their respective companies.

Businesses should be aware of their employees with these skills to ensure they are working to their full potential.

Ari Kopoulos
ari@employeeconnect.com

CEO at EmployeeConnect