Create incentives
Organizations can improve retention rates and employee performance by making it easier for their people to find new opportunities within an organization. According to the Accenture study, organizations can also develop the skills and knowledge of all talent, regardless of their position in the company. Some of these strategies include involving employees in company decision-making processes, a practice used by 60 percent of executives surveyed.
Other organizations empower employees by giving them the opportunity to work on diverse, limited-term assignments, rather than in one department or function. Some organizations develop a talent exchange. This connects employees and other resources with appropriate projects, roles, and positions across the company. Real-time goal setting, performance measurement, and skills-development programs ensure that people always know how well they're doing their job. They can then address performance issues and skills gaps before these become a problem.
Successful firms also recommend embracing a wide range of emerging information technologies—including personalized employee Web portals, business simulation, and relearning—to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their training and development efforts.
Manage employee progress
To create successful incentive programs, it's important to manage each employee's progress. This is most easily done with an automated human resources (HR) management system.
HR management solutions can help companies fulfill the potential and increase the loyalty of their workforce while minimizing the cost and complexity of administrating salaries, benefits, recruiting, and performance management.
Company decision-makers must be able to assess and drive their people's performance to ensure that they align with business goals. Human resource management tools can show which employees are doing which jobs and the percentage of employees in each position, define opportunities for improvement and growth, and organize the teams and business groups that have the highest potential for success.
Automated HR management systems also give each employee control of their personal information and career path. Your people can easily access contact records, time-off tracking, performance review files, individual payroll data, benefits updates, and other information that matters to them. At the same time, in taking care of many basic needs and functions without assistance, employees help streamline HR administration.
There's another benefit to automating HR management. Automation and the smart use of software tools can greatly simplify administrative tasks and help control costs. The software can streamline payroll processing, improve the efficiency and fairness of recruiting, hiring, and performance reviews, help ensure full compliance with government regulations and industry standards, and facilitate consistent, productive access to information and collaboration.
"Clients want work done faster and cheaper," says David Hofferberth, managing director of Service Performance Insight, a Cincinnati-based research firm covering technologies that impact the services sector. "The fact is, you have to have the resources available to do the work faster."
