Human Resource Development Challenges To Consider
Your employees are the most important part of your business. As long as they are happy in the workplace, they perform better and boost your ROI. However, uncertainty in the workplace, changes, or lack of development opportunities can lead to low morale and disengagement. In addition, poor team dynamics can impact productivity by creating an unpleasant working environment. Finally, compliance breaches due to lack of training impact your company image and bottom line negatively. Let’s look into these human resource development challenges and discover tips to deal with them.
Challenge: Low Employee Morale
Morale describes how employees feel about their job, coworkers, managers, and work environment as a whole. It may seem like an intangible quality to most managers, however, its impact on profits and productivity is visible and measurable. Low employee morale can be attributed to a variety of factors, such as job security concerns, dramatic changes, limited opportunities for development, or lack of fair compensation. In any case, it can negatively affect your business in multiple ways.
Companies that suffer from this HR development challenge are faced with a variety of adverse effects. An important issue that goes hand in hand with low morale is low employee engagement. Less engaged teams are unproductive and unmotivated to go the extra mile. In addition, a lack of development opportunities leads to low morale. When employees aren’t effectively trained, they feel unappreciated by their managers and lose interest in their job. The ultimate drawback of low employee morale, though, is high turnover rates. If employees aren’t happy with their job for an extended period of time, they leave. Then, you are left to cope with the loss of a team member (as well as their skills and experience) and the costs of recruiting someone to replace them.
When morale is high, your employees become super-productive, service quality increases, and they bring in stellar results. Even if your company isn’t at that level, you can still get there. Here are some tips to boost the mood in your business and improve productivity and ROI.
1. Train Managers
Morale in the workplace is influenced from the top-down rather than from the bottom up. Therefore, it’s important to train managers on subjects like emotional intelligence and communication. Even if they’re not the source of low morale, it’s their responsibility to fix the problem. Managers must cultivate a culture of trust and positive morale through modeling, reward systems, and resource management. This way, employees are motivated to do their best and be present.
2. Practice Job Enrichment
As a manager, you possess another weapon that can combat low morale. That is making sure that employees utilize their skill set to the max through job enrichment. This involves, first and foremost, understanding their skills and abilities. Then, make your team’s everyday work routine more engaging. Give them extra tasks, provide a challenge to keep things interesting, and give them the freedom to take initiative. Don’t forget to offer feedback and recognize achievements so that employees feel appreciated and motivated to continue growing in their roles.
3. Connect With Your Team
For employees to have high engagement and feel passionate about their job, they must feel that they share a common purpose with their management. Therefore, it’s crucial for managers to be in constant and open communication with their teams to form genuine relationships and mutual respect. Establish frequent team meetings and be transparent about company issues—even if they are unpleasant. Pay attention to your team’s feedback and explore their ideas. It’s difficult for low employee morale to occur in such an open and supportive environment.
Challenge: Ineffective Team Dynamics
Teamwork promotes creativity and is the key component to the success of any business. A team with balanced dynamics brings in better outcomes, increases customer satisfaction, and improves your bottom line. However, there are quite a few challenges that could curve its productivity. Let’s explore some of them and see how they are harming your business.
A common challenge that teams face is lack of trust. Making the transition from working alone to group work involves letting other people make decisions you previously made on your own. If team members aren’t well acquainted with each other, this can lead to misunderstandings or even conflict. Another challenge to watch out for is role uncertainty. Working in large groups can cause confusion about your place in the team, as well as where your responsibilities begin and end. As a result, some team members end up carrying disproportionate responsibilities compared to others, which can cause tension within the team. Finally, teams with poor dynamics often deal with low engagement due to a lack of purpose and direction. Not understanding how their work contributes to the company vision makes teams indifferent to the progress of their project.
Building good team dynamics is a human resource development challenge that all businesses have to deal with at some point. To overcome the issues above, you need to work on building trust and improving communication among team members. Here are a few tips to help you build the team culture that will lead you to success.
1. Deal With Poor Performance
If you don’t deal with poor performance early on, there is a great chance it will impact team productivity. Take action as soon as you realize that an underperforming team member is affecting team spirit. Make them aware of the situation, lay out your expectations, and discuss some progress goals. It might be a difficult conversation, but you must make sure that they are motivated to get back on track.
2. Establish Group Discussions
For your business to be successful, team members must feel comfortable with each other so that they can freely share their ideas and opinions. Invite employees to have regular group discussions where they can get to know each other better on a personal level. Urge them to exchange ideas and feedback about topics that are relevant to everyone. This way, trust will be built among them, making the teams a lot more effective.
3. Utilize Peer Coaching
Peer coaching is also a great way to improve communication within teams. It drives team members to learn from each other and see things from another person’s perspective. Through regular communication, team members build relationships and become more effective collaborators. Coaching sessions can happen weekly to touch bases and review progress or more often if there is a particular gap that needs to be addressed.
Challenge: Compliance Breaches
Compliance is a human resource development challenge that’s becoming increasingly complicated and multi-faceted with each passing year. As a result, dealing with compliance breaches is now an alarmingly common occurrence. But what is the real impact of continuous compliance breaches on your organization?
When employees are unaware of or indifferent towards the rules and laws that apply to their job and organization overall, they make frequent on-the-job errors. These errors can lead to delays in deadlines, subpar services, and decreased customer satisfaction. In the case of safety compliance breaches, you might have to deal with accidents that hinder productivity and cost money in compensations. In addition to being costly, compliance breaches can also damage your company’s reputation. If you are underperforming in the compliance department, clients might feel safer turning to another business, thus further impacting your bottom line. Let’s also not forget that if HR isn’t compliant, your business might end up discriminating against employees by creating a non-safe environment or even giving unfair pay.
No one can say that remaining compliant is an easy feat. It is a never-ending task that requires continuous work from managers and employees alike. However, that doesn’t mean that it is impossible. Here, we’ll share a few easy tips to prevent breaches and make sure that your business is always compliant.
1. Stay Informed
With the pace legislation is being introduced or updated, HR departments are faced with a mountain of compliance rules to keep up with. Labor laws, minimum wage updates, sexual harassment mandates, safety rules, the list just keeps getting longer. In light of all that, you must make sure that your HR department gets its legislative news from a quick and credible source. On top of that, HR needs to know how new laws apply to your business and adapt accordingly.
2. Train Managers And Employees
A surprising number of compliance violations occur because either managers or employees didn’t know any better. Don’t rest assured that your employees—even your most experienced ones—know everything about compliance. Invest in training courses for your staff and make sure that employees of all levels are taking them. You could even build a JIT compliance resource library so that everyone can have easy access to any information they need. It will make compliance training a lot more effective.
3. Invest In Compliance Software
There is a lot that goes into running a business and completing daily tasks. Therefore, ensuring that everyone is on time with their compliance training certifications might be too much to ask from the HR department. The only way to be certain that your organization is compliant is to invest in software that will automatically manage compliance issues. Then, HR will have significant support in assigning compliance training resources, sending notifications for overdue certifications, and reporting among other things.
More Tips To Overcome Human Resource Development Challenges
In this article, we explored some human resource development challenges that can impact your organization’s productivity and efficiency. Specifically, how low employee morale and poor team dynamics can lead to a lack of motivation and engagement and how compliance breaches can damage your company’s productivity, reputation, and budget. Hopefully, our tips can help you recognize and overcome these issues.
Download the eBook HR Troubleshooting Guide: Tips To Overcome Your 9 Biggest Human Resource Development Challenges to discover actionable tips and proven techniques.
