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Archive for the ‘Business Trends’ Category

There is a new to the business paradigm that can be easily noticed if you pay attention to trends in the business climate that we see in the business news sections of our local newspapers. It’s odd when we notice that even in good economic times, there will often be sudden waves of lay offs in businesses that we know are doing well.

Anybody who has been the victim of a lay off can empathize with the disruption and emotional trauma such a change can cause. Studies in business trends have documented that the phenomena of large scale business lay offs has been much more prevalent in the last ten years than in previous eras of the history of our business communities. So one has to ask, what has caused this shift in behavior by employers?

While economic conditions and sudden shifts in the marketplace can have a lot to do with how employers manage their staffing, that is not sufficient to explain this dramatic change of behavior in the business relationship between employer and employee. The real base cause of this change comes from a change in philosophy of employers.

The historic business model between employer and employee is one of a mutually supportive contract. Whether the contract is agreed to or just understood, the agreement is the employer will pay the employee and provide him or her with the basic needs they have to work on site for them. The employee will, in return perform his or her duties on time and well, come to work reliably and to be a loyal employee. This model is mutually supportive, creative and based on trust.

The business paradigm that has resulted in a lay off based model with a basic change to how employees are viewed such that?

§ Employees are viewed as a nuisance and a cost that many times the employer resents. This resentment is especially acute in regards to employee benefits such as insurance and vacations which the employer sees as not his responsibility.

§ Employees are expected to fulfill their role in the previous business model but to do so strictly from gratitude for the paycheck and no more. As such, the employer expects the same return from the previous model but they want to change the model in terms of employer expectations with no change from the employee side.

§ Long term benefits can be suppressed via a frequent turn over in the employee base. By replacing experienced staff, the need to see salaries rise and to provide vacations and eventually retirement benefits is reduced because the employer keeps the work force at the entry level status indefinitely.

§ The base assumption of this new model is that there is an inexhaustible supply of skilled labor “out there” in the unemployed labor pool. Therefore, current employees can be easily replaced with eager unemployed people so the human resource equation becomes exploitive.

While this business model does make some economic sense, like any equation, the base assumption has to remain perpetually true for the model to work long term. But this equation only works in a depressed economy where there are a large amount of skilled people on the labor market. This approach to human resource management can backfire badly if there is a shift in the labor markets that eliminate that abundant supply of replacement workers.

This exploitive approach to management of employees changes the assumption of trust between employee and employer to an assumption of distrust. It can have a devastating affect on employee morale so that even employees still being employed will deliver poor performance because they no longer are in a supportive relationship with management. The answer of “Well, then we will just fire those dead beats and get new ones” is not a working solution because once the employee morale is low, productivity across the work force goes down and stays down.

This affects the ability of the businesses to support current projects and deliver quality good and services to the marketplace. And as an exploitive attitude toward workers results in poor products and services for clients, the business will begin to lose market share which is the early signals that the business is destined for extinction. This is reason enough to reexamine the business model of employment and reconsider returning to a trust relationship with the employee base in our companies, for their good as well as for our own.

It doesn’t take a lot of research to find out that in this day and age, virtually every business of any real size has developed some form of internet presence. Now, for many businesses, that may mean little more than an online business card that can be used to get the phone number and store location of the business into the mind of the prospective customer. But in this new century, the idea of having a business without a corresponding web page to support it is pretty much out of the question.

But if you look at the two business worlds, the internet business environment and that outside of cyberspace, there are some pretty big differences. While many companies like bookstores or concert ticket promoters have learned to build what might be viewed as parallel universes in which their business operations are just as sophisticated online as outside of cyberspace, other businesses have just not found that balance.

But as the legitimacy of the internet as a valid marketplace and business tool becomes more understood, more and more businesses are learning that cyberspace can become another valuable part of an overall marketing plan that drives business to the store shelves directly from their internet web presence.

So just as that billboard or newspaper coupon program are just as much part of the businesses corporate plan, that online effort out there in on the corporate web site can become a vital part of the stores operation so much so that the store manager will come to depend on the sales driven by the internet. To that store manager they will look for cyberspace on aisle five as a vital part of their plan for business success.

There is a systematic process that businesses go through to use the internet as a way of capturing web traffic and turning it into store traffic. Make no mistake, there is one principle that should seem evident but is the key to turning cyber visitors to in store shoppers and that is that ? Internet Shoppers are People Too!

When a businessperson looks at those strange internet traffic reports that show that they web site has X number of “hits” and that Z number of web browsers went to Y number of web pages, all of that cyberspace mumbo jumbo just means that X number of PEOPLE were on your web site and looked at Y number of products or web page advertisements or services. And those PEOPLE are the same living and breathing humans who will walk in the front door of your store and buy products and services from you.

All we need to do is devise methods to drive those internet shoppers off of their computers and into the businesses retail operations. And more and more you are seeing a businesses trend of internet promotions that are geared to put the customers feet down in the retail space. Some great methods for doing that are?

* Online coupons that can be redeemed only in the retail store.
* Online sales that can be picked up in the store. Many online shoppers might prefer to have the product shipped to them. So you will have to “sweeten the pot” by making shipping charges out of the question or by adding a promotion if the customer picks up his or her purchase in person.
* Contests. Need we say more?
* By promoting special events that will occur in the store. You can stage a major cyberspace promotional campaign for a book signing of an author or celebrity that will occur live at the store itself. The costs of the promotion and having the in store event will be offset by the increased sales.

If your web site routinely uses promotions that result in positive incentives to the customer to come to the store, before long a customer base of loyal consumers will get used to first going online to see what this week’s big deal is and then going to the store to cash in. That kind of ongoing momentum is what makes such a synergy such a success and what makes even customers come to your retail outlet and look for “cyberspace on aisle five.”

The business paradigm in virtually every department of the modern business has been undergoing continuous change in the last ten years to such an extent that it becomes necessary to step back and review how we do business in all aspects of corporate life in light of new markets and new ways even our employees do business. This is as much true in our Human Resource Department as it is in Marketing. The labor pool is changing and the impact on the bottom line of the business can see be serious if we don’t change how we go about recruitment and view employee retention in light of the changes to the available educated labor “out there” to draw upon for our staffing needs.

Employee retention and how we approach the concept of keeping employees over many years is an area where certain assumptions must be challenged if we are going to stay competitive. Some assumptions concerning employee retention that are rapidly becoming obsolete include?

§ That there is an unlimited resource of eager employees out there to fill my staffing needs.
§ That it’s a good idea to cycle employees in and out of the company because that keeps benefits costs down.
§ That the “my way or the highway” approach to management is the right way to go to enforce your vision for how work will get done.
§ That employees are commodities. There are always more where they came from.
§ That employees should be grateful just to get a paycheck.
§ It is better to keep a youthful staff and to move older employees out of the work place.

The labor pool in changing with shifts in the demographics in the country and those changes make these assumptions obsolete and dangerous if we expect to keep a staff that can provide quality support for our business objectives. Because the “baby boom” is leaving the market and being replaced with a smaller and less skilled youth population, we have to adjust our expectations both in terms of hiring and retention.

Probably the biggest change we have to get used to is to begin to view employees as valued assets and to give significant attention to retention, not just once a year at performance review time but on a daily and weekly basis. The assumption that employees will work for us for a paycheck and that we can exert leverage in the management situation because of a large labor pool we can tap to replace unhappy employees has become a flawed approach to people management.

The truth is the pool of talented labor is shirking at an alarming rate. If you have a staff of skilled people who you have invested in to bring up their knowledge and skill levels, that is an investment worth. Skilled and educated employees are in short supply and, above all, they know they are in demand so they can move from job to job without difficulty if they become dissatisfied at their current work place.

These changes to the paradigm of emplacement justify a corporate wide reevaluation of retention policies and strategies. The HR Department should be on the forefront of changing the business’s attitude toward employees from one of “us against them” to one of employee empowerment and partnership.

The managers who will excel at retaining valuable, productive and trained employees will be those who see the employment relationship as a contract in which management has responsibilities to employees to assure their continued growth and success just as the employee must pull his weight in the company. A partnership approach to management will go a long way toward improving the company’s retention profile which will benefit the business in a multitude of ways.