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Archive for the ‘Business Trends’ Category

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.

One of the most important talents any management team of a business can have is to be able to detect changes in the marketplace and adjust how the business operates to function in that new market. Some call it “thinking outside the box” and others refer to this talent as “working with a new paradigm”. Whatever the term of the day is, without the flexibility to change as the market changes, a business is destined to fade away.

Of the many business and market trends that have changed the paradigm by which business is done in the new century, internet marketing ranks near the top of the most drastic and sweeping change that virtually every business has had to adapt to in order to survive and thrive in the new business world.

At first, most in the business world considered the internet to be a toy and perhaps a good communication tool. But in the last decade, the power of internet marketing and the need to compete in that marketplace has never been more evident. And just as business learns new marketing and communication methods when they enter a new market such as learning to do business overseas, the internet has brought with it entirely new tools and weapons that the modern business must learn to use skillfully to succeed in a cyberspace business environment.

Of the many new acronyms that have been added to the business vocabulary, “SEO” is one that is central to success in the internet marketing world. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it is an entire discipline unto itself. By learning to utilize well developed SEO methods, a business can learn to dominate their particular market niche even in a cyberspace business world.

Just as in the conventional business world, to be successful with a particular market, you have to go where they are and learn to get noticed and get your message to the consumer even as your competition is doing the same thing. In the world outside of cyberspace that may mean various methods of advertising, promotional campaigns, good customer service and a long term promotional strategy that will grow the businesses market presence over time.

All of these business objectives remain the same in the world of internet marketing, but the “places” customers can be found are profoundly different. As such, it becomes critical that a business builds a modern and up to date web site that appeals to the customers perceptions of what they will expect when they come to shop with you and that stays up to date continuously s the internet continues to change and evolve.

But it isn’t enough to just have a state of the art business web site up for modern internet business web site to succeed. Just as to be successful in the physical world, customers must come to you or you must go to them. And the primary method of letting customers know who you are and drawing them to your well designed web site is to connect to them through a search engine such as Yahoo, Google or MSN.

Search Engine Optimization methods are powerful techniques that can be used to assure that when your customer looks for a business such as yours, they will notice you first and your competition second, or not at all. That means when the customer “searches” for your product or service on Google or another search engine, your business comes up on the first page of selections that the search engine finds.

SEO takes time, investment of funds and talent and skill to work with the search engines so your business gets that kind of attention. But it is worth the investment because the outcome can be an internet business presence that bring the kind of success every business wants.

For decades, the classic model of how a business organizes its computer services department was to establish a separate IT department with an independent management structure which may extend all the way to the executive suite. Over the years, the autonomy of that centralized IT function took on almost mythic proportions and in some cases resulted in abusive attitudes and ways of doing business that almost gave the impression that the business existed to serve the IT department rather than the other way around.

This was a particularly prevalent model when all business computer processing was done by a large centralized mainframe computer, usually made by IBM. These mega computers are and were expensive and complicated to program and operate which dictated that to be successful, a business had to keep on staff a small army of computer specialists, many of whom seemed to speak an entirely different language and come from a different culture than those in the rest of the business.

This was a natural and necessary business paradigm under the circumstances when “big iron” ruled the IT community. However, the last several decades have seen changes to how IT gets its business done. First was the introduction of smaller, powerful systems driven by operating systems like UNIX that were capable of great efficiencies that challenged the supremacy of the mainframe in business.

The movement toward network computing which was a natural business evolution to facilitate greater data access and to build stronger communications between spread out departments in the business world further eroded the need for one centralized powerful computer operated by a select few who spoke a cryptic language. Network computing started the process of democratizing computing power in the business world. With the new dominance of the internet and the need to take the business paradigm into cyberspace, the business model of decentralized data processing has taken on new meaning and importance.

In many businesses, the final stage of IT decentralization has begun to become a reality. By locating centers of operations and development authority and responsibility directly at the department level, the efficiencies of IT decentralization have become possible at every level of the business.

This trend in locating department specific applications along with the computing resources to support them to the department level is a significant change to the business culture. Not only do the departments who benefit from those applications take ownership over the operation of those computing systems, programming and development resources will be become part of the department structure as well.

For example, if the HR department has a suite of applications that are used to tracking payroll, benefits, etc., that application will be placed completely under the authority of HR. As such, areas of authority that were formerly the sole responsibility of IT such as systems analysis, development, programming and computer operations will become part of the HR management structure. As a result, each department develops an ability to converse in IT terminologies which results in a higher IT awareness across the business that is healthy for long-term analysis of needs and resources to meet those needs.

This is not to say that new problems and challenges do not come along with the decentralization of IT. Some IT issues must be addressed at a global level because they impact the business as a whole. So there is still need for a CIO and some high level IT controls to which each of the departmentalized systems must be accountable.

Further, the issue of systems integration and finding synergies between systems to maximize the efficiency of systems becomes more difficult when each department operates its own IT operation. If each department owns and operates its own hardware and network, communications across the business are challenged and there is a higher chance that underutilization of systems will be a result. Quality control at the systems administration level is more difficult because systems administrators may be answerable only to the department level more so than to the business in general.

These organizational issues must be resolved at a high level so the transition from a centralized to decentralized way of doing business can be successful. But the rewards of putting computing power at the department level outweigh the risks of failure and justify the effort that will go with such a large change to the corporate culture.