How long has it been since your business refreshed any standard operating procedures? With new tools, updated trends, and evolving trajectory every day, it’s no surprise that the world’s top organizations are designing new ways of managing the workforce. Top Applicant is taking an in-depth look into 4 of the most groundbreaking ways organizations are evolving for the future.
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Choose Your Path
AI Integration and Optimization
Putting Employee Well-Being First
Skills-First Talent Development
Cultivating an Agile Workforce
How are you managing?
Building one of the world’s most detailed hiring platforms takes an enormous amount of work behind the scenes. Yet, we still take the time to evolve our management strategy as our business changes.
Top Applicant shares some of the same growing pains that companies posting jobs on our platform do. We consistently research ways to refine our approaches by updating
best practices and change our strategy accordingly. So, how are you managing your team to take on whatever the world throws at them?
Why You Should Rethink Strategy
Ideas cost nothing, but following through takes time, effort, and investment in human capital. But the right management can boost the satisfaction of your team and the productivity of your business, while also giving you a more solid strategy and vision for long-term growth.
Regardless of your company size or how managers implement a new strategy, staying transparent across the board creates the smoothest experimentation without impacting your bottom line. Consider these new strategies as some food for thought!
1. AI Integration and Optimization
AI is transforming workforce management by automating tasks, analyzing data, and enhancing decision-making. This leads to increased efficiency, streamlined workflows,
and a more personalized employee experience. AI can reduce bias in hiring, optimize schedules, and tailor learning opportunities. So why aren’t more businesses using it?
Challenges
Challenges in implementation can make it difficult to reap the benefits when businesses integrate AI for managing the workforce. Hurdles like connecting to legacy systems, data privacy concerns, employee resistance, and algorithmic bias all plague organizations that use artificial intelligence improperly.
We recommend mitigating these issues by adding human managers to help with prioritization, data governance, extensive training, complex communications, and performing regular audits.
Implementation
Organizations that use AI tools successfully document the process of integrating different AI tools to build an initial baseline of data. Factors like time-to-hire, engagement, and overall performance can be optimized by integrating AI tools to streamline day-to-day tasks.
To integrate AI successfully into your existing HR processes, you will need their insight to set infrastructure requirements, objectives, and strategizing the integration.To facilitate the success of your upgraded system, we recommend regular check-ins regarding KPIs, auditing for bias, and soliciting employees for user feedback regularly.
Success Stories
- Kroger applied AI to analyze customer traffic patterns and transaction times to optimize staffing levels and reduce wait times at checkout lanes.
- Hilton Hotels employs an AI-powered scheduling system to match staff with guest needs and preferences, leading to higher satisfaction scores.
- Home Goods and a few other pharmacy chains have implemented AI to optimize employee schedules. This has helped improve customer service and reduce wait times for customers!
2. Putting Employee Well-Being First
The second revolution for managing the workforce involves putting the employee first. Many organizations have started noticing the benefits of elevating the employee experience and improving mental well-being.
Common benefits include higher productivity, greater job satisfaction, and increased retention. Key drivers of employee well-being include fostering teamwork, identifying purpose, prioritizing fairness, establishing clear recognition, increasing flexibility, and training supportive leadership.
Talking It Out
To prioritize employee well-being, organizations should solicit employee feedback, identify areas for improvement, define well-being initiatives, and establish metrics to track their impact. Management should not plan these initiatives in a silo. Talking to your employees can help identify real gaps you can help fill!
Feeding Forward
Regularly evaluate employee engagement, turnover rates, and program utilization to understand the effectiveness of well-being initiatives.
Potential challenges include measuring ROI, ensuring access to resources, addressing intricate needs, and helping employees feel secure to open up about mental health support in the workplace. In most cases, this is a great time to implement our next idea for managing the workforce.
3. Skills-First Talent Development
Just like investing in the well-being of your employees, developing a skills-first development strategy prioritizes improving skills and consistent performance over traditional qualifications.
This type of development offers benefits like flexible workforces, long-term cost savings, vastly improved retention, and even better performance! Still, there are some reasons teams can’t seem to execute this management style correctly.
Obstacles
Like with any strategy, skills-first development has bumps in the road. In this case, we find skill evaluation and resistance from hiring managers to be some of the most troublesome hurdles businesses struggle to overcome.
You can mitigate these concerns through standardized assessments, further training opportunities, and clear consequences for both positive and negative performance.
Implementation
To successfully implement this strategy, organizations should identify essential skills, re-evaluate job descriptions, develop skills-based assessments, and retrain hiring managers.
Executing this can be messy unless you take a strategic approach across your team. It’s best to update this particular system for everyone at once to ensure fair treatment for every employee.
This strategy can also elevate the hiring process through blind resume screening, skills-based hiring platforms, and an objective skill assessment—all of which you can find right here on your company’s Top Applicant page!
Evaluation
Key metrics for evaluating success include diversity of new hires, time-to-hire, and cost-per-hire. Internally, companies can fine-tune how they manage the workforce by tracking performance, investigating retention rates, and reviewing feedback from hiring managers to assess the intangible benefits of this strategy. With every review, you’ll improve your entire system further and further!
Forward-Thinking Companies
- PwC has also embraced a skills-first approach, committing a significant investment towards upskilling its global workforce and achieving a substantial reduction in hiring timecompared to traditional methods.
- Cisco has also demonstrated the effectiveness of skills-first hiring through its partnership with the OneTen initiative, which focuses on creating meaningful opportunities for individuals without 4-year degrees.
- Microsoft’s Leap Apprenticeship Program emphasizes skills development and has successfully increased the representation of diverse talent within the company.
4. Cultivating an Agile and Flexible Workforce
An agile and flexible workforce adapts quickly to changes, leading to increased productivity, employee satisfaction, and reduced burnout. Flexible work arrangements, cross-functional teams, and employee empowerment are all changing how companies manage the workforce.
Agile principles and emerging technology are helping companies promote flexibility, collaboration, and satisfaction on or off the clock for their employees. Here’s how existing companies can cultivate a more effective workforce!
Planning
To cultivate an agile and flexible workforce, organizations should assess current work patterns and employee needs, then develop clear policies for remote, hybrid, and flexible work. Invest in technology and communication tools that enable seamless collaboration, and focus on evaluating performance based on outcomes and results. Successful companies also train managers on leadership skills to make things like scheduling and organizing even easier.
Execution
Starting with flexible scheduling options like hybrid work models and cross-functional collaboration is a great way to integrate employees and create an agile workforce.
By combining this concept with benefits from a skills-first approach, businesses develop highly effective and efficient talent! For lasting development, we recommend encouraging employee autonomy, trust, and transparency.
Evaluation
To truly understand the impact of an agile workforce, managers need to regularly monitor employee productivity, engagement, and satisfaction.
Companies should also develop ways to measure the agility and responsiveness of their team to make future changes easier.. You should also consider feedback from employees and managers to navigate through any areas of improvement.
Obstacles
Many employers trying to create more flexible workforces have to hurdle employee or stakeholder resistance to change, communication barriers, and difficulties ensuring equitable access to resources. These hurdles can be mitigated by communicating the benefits of flexibility and involving employees in policy development.
Organizations should encourage regular collaboration as needed through internal meetings, team-building activities, and other opportunities to maintain a cohesive company culture through every change.
Amazingly Agile Workforces
- Spotify famously organizes its workforce into autonomous “squads” within larger “tribes,” utilizing agile methodologies to maintain a high degree of flexibility and encourage rapid innovation in its product development.
- Zara leverages agile management principles to guide its design and production processes. This enables the company to rapidly adapt with trends and bring new designs to market in remarkable time.
- IBM has also adopted agile practices in their software development processes, leading to faster product updates and improved responsiveness to customer feedback.
The Human Way to Manage
To meet the ever-changing demands of the job market, employers are rethinking how they’re managing the workforce. If you’re ready to join the HR revolution, Top Applicant is here to help with features designed for the next generation of hiring!
Fully customizable profiles, free job listings, and integrated pre-screening criteria streamline the hiring process for employers. While rethinking the way you manage your team, why not rethink the way you hire?
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