The Four Biggest People Challenges of 2022

 

We all know that business growth is dependent on having the right people and skills in place to deliver your business plan, but the past year has seen a record number moving jobs and a real struggle for all of us to find and keep good people.

Here are our thoughts on the four key people challenges that we have identified businesses are facing today that threaten growth for the future:

1. Attracting the best people
   

If you’re planning to hire in the next year, it may well take longer and cost you more than it has done before. We are expecting a continuation of the last 6+ months of skilled worker shortages, from logistics through to software vacancies.

Practically that may mean making some systems changes, which could include better resource planning and hiring before a vacancy is pressing, running a faster recruitment process to keep hold of good candidates, reviewing salaries on offer or increasing internal training programmes. If you don’t want long term vacancies to slow you down, you’ll need to put some effort into candidate attraction and finding good people.

2. Developing your leadership and management team
   

We’ve had 2 years on and off of remote working, changing our strategies, switching between short term reactions and long term planning. It’s time to refocus on the skills, resilience and leadership abilities of our senior team who are going to yet again carry us through a year of unknowns.

Alongside building up these leadership skills, we need to enable their focus to stay on keeping customers happy, commercial awareness and supporting their people, including those they haven’t spent much face to face time with recently.

We have found that bite-sized, 90 min leadership and management training is becoming more valued by team members and is much more easily consumed than the old world “training day” approach. Get developing your key team onto the agenda to kick start 2022.

3. Retaining your brilliant people
   

It is never good to lose your brightest and best in a tricky labour market, so now is the time to engage with the team and buck the trends of the great resignation. Finding out what is frustrating and irritating your team – be that the systems, the workload or the boss – and finding creative ways to take away that pain will pay dividends in retaining key people. The second part is how they can build a career with you, both in terms of self-improvement (communication, resilience, customer service training), the specific skills they need for the day job, and leadership and management (see above).

The cost of training and keeping these people is likely to be much less than the cost of replacing them, once you’ve factored in the inefficiencies of notice periods, hiring, induction and getting truly productive.

4. Building a team for the future
   

We have changed because of COVID, Brexit, and the shift in the predominant generation leading our workplaces. The workplaces of the future (and the present!) believe in social and environmental sustainability, flexibility and home working, provision for mental health, and greater use of technology and AI than ever before.

We are never going to ‘go back to how it was’ – we are only going to go forward to a new normal. The need to satisfy our customers on an individual basis is more important than ever, as it is to treat our teams like individuals and enable their personal lives to play a key part in how their working life is shaped.

Without a robust people plan that allows for progress, the way we work will become stale and will not meet the needs of us as leaders, our people or our customers. Focusing on how we want our organisations and teams to work in the future takes planning and change.

It can seem like a daunting task – there is always much to do. As the founder of People Puzzles, I’d encourage you to stay curious, keep a sense of perspective, but also try to put yourself in the shoes of the people who work in your team. What do they need? Ask them, but also try and imagine it for yourself. Get them to help you find the solution to build a business that you can all be proud of.

If you think your business could benefit from a People Director – or you feel you need support to ensure you are attracting the best people, developing your leadership and management team, retaining your brilliant people, and building a team for the future, we’d love to have a chat. Call us on 0203 239 3307 for a complimentary call and see how we can help to get your business in the best place for success.