Staffing - The right person in the right place
Md Shadman-Al-Karim
From a multinational organisation to a street cart business, employees play a key role behind success or failure. If money is the fuel, infrastructures are the body and wheels and you, as an owner, are the driver, then employees are definitely the engine of your business. If they keep functioning accurately, your profit will keep coming constantly. Before having all these, you must find and bring in those employees to the business who will keep it rolling for you.
Mostly in our capital city we have seen a massive growth of restaurants and hotels in last few years. Small food carts are also taking up the streets. Yet, after initial successes, a significant number of startup businesses are failing due to the problem of proper staffing.
For example, I have talked with some owners of recent failures in startup restaurant businesses in Lalbagh area. The main reason they cited was none other than lack of proper staffing. They started with chefs who could cook, but failed to satisfy the taste buds of diners. They hired staff who could serve, but didnt behave properly with the customers. They failed because they couldnt place the right person in the right place. If they could have put a versatile chef in the kitchen and hired an experienced staff who could teach others about how to do things correctly, the result would have been entirely different.
All these story-telling was just to lure you in, dear readers. But these are real stories that can help you to avoid the same mistakes they made. The most important thing is to staff up properly and retain good employees until they bring value to your precious time and investment. At first, we have to define and integrate short-term staffing actions with the longer- term context of business strategy.
To staff up your business properly:
1. Find out the current talent that exists within your industry based on skills, performance etc.
2. Consider the critical issues related to your business and determine the five to 10 most critical competencies (skills, abilities, knowledge) essential to address the issue.
3. Determine the skills that differentiate one level of the employee population from another (for example, the skills that make the difference between a chef and a server).
4. Try to recruit a diversified employee pool, including women, older persons, etc. They come in handy in many situations.
After bringing those talent pools into the business, you need to retain them so that they bring fruit to your hard work. Here, you also have to develop a strategy as well:
1. Find the reasons why employees leave in your industry (job dissatisfaction, lack of training, etc).
2. Find out successful organisations that are good at keeping employees and try to use their techniques, if possible.
3. Find out the problems you are likely to face if employees leave and make a contingency plan for that situation.
4. Try to keep your employees motivated, well paid, trained with new equipment and procedures, and reward them so that they feel important members of the business.
Thus, think carefully before you hire an employee because only the right person in the right place will one day make your small business a very big one.
