There are two things that every company in Ireland needs to focus on – meeting goals and developing a workforce strategy around them. When the two are separate, little gets done. Your company has plenty of goals to meet, from sales targets to project completions and more.
How are your employees working to meet those goals? Are things getting done as they should? When your workforce strategy is separate from your goals, the odds are good that those goals aren’t properly being met. The two need to align in order for your business to be successful.
How Does This Happen?
If your business in Ireland is like most of the others, then you’re already aware of the disconnect between your human resources department and the people in charge of the other branches of the company. This disconnect is caused by a lack of good communication.
For example, if one section of your business brings in two new clients, and they don’t inform HR that they need new employees to get this work done, then those targets aren’t being met. There shouldn’t be this lack of communication. Everyone needs to be in the loop.
Getting Everyone on the Same Page
In order to prevent future issues, you need to have a good workforce strategy in place that has everyone on the same page. Of course, this is often easier said than done. Not only do these separate departments have their own sets of leaders and rules that need to be implemented, but they have very different methods of operating.
Human resources handle the hiring, firing, scheduling, and other things that are necessary in order to track and reward employees, while the sales department brings in new clients and then hands them off to yet another group within the company that does the work.
To put it simply, these departments more than likely don’t speak the same language. However, in order to get meet those company-wide goals, they must meet in the middle.
Putting This into Practice
The tricky part lies in getting the leaders of these very different departments to communicate with one another.
Here’s how this should be done, thanks to a number of strategies and some software.
Start with an Assessment
Before you put any plans into place regarding your workforce strategy, you need to do an assessment. This assessment will examine every aspect of the departments in question and help you develop a list of things that must be changed in order for communication to flow.
You might find that your employees in these different departments simply don’t fraternize with each other, leading them to just not consider what the other one needs. These assessments can be as detailed and lengthy as they need to be in order to meet your new goals.
Planning Is Important
The next step involves developing plans to foster this communication and goal setting. This can be done using human capital management systems, which are designed to track many different aspects of your HR department, track administrative tasks, and even ensure that your employees in various departments are communicating effectively.
This software goes hand in hand with the workforce strategy that you need to develop in order to have everything go smoothly.
In addition to this, when you’re working on the plans, don’t forget to include some fun activities, such as company-wide outings and multi-departmental gatherings. If the people in these departments don’t know each other, then they are less likely to communicate.
Define and Adjust Your Company’s Structure
Next, you might find that your company’s structure needs to be changed. If so, don’t be afraid to put everything in motion for this to happen. This is where reporting and analytics come into play.
If the numbers find that departments need to be combined in order for them to work better and consider each other’s needs, then by all means, do so. You’d be surprised at how often companies in the UK find that an adjustment like this makes everything flow better.
The results will be worth it when those workforce strategy goals are met.
