New Year, New Me phenomenon
The New Year has long been a time where people will review the outgoing year and decide on what's next. Whether it is personal or professional, the start of a new year serves as a catalyst for self-improvement, career exploration and advancement, as many engage with the “New Year, New Me” phenomenon. Consequently, it is important for businesses not to give staff a reason to leave, and ensure they are doing two things really well to mitigate this. These are looking after employees and ensuring they have suitable staff trained as a contingency, if the worst were to happen.
Do Right By Your People
If your business isn't taking care of employee needs, your workers could be tempted by a potential new year job offer, even if they weren’t on the hunt for one. Don't just take my word for it, recruitment experts claim that the beginning of the year is usually the busiest time for job hopping. Indeed released its UK insight data for 2023, that provided feedback from workers across all sectors. Their data listed the following as the top six reasons for people finding new employment. If your business could be doing better in any of these areas, then there's room for improvement:
Recognition
Resources
Higher pay
Career advancement
Job satisfaction
Working conditions
Training delivered to recognised occupational standards is critical for business
And it’s not only employees who engage with the New Year phenomenon! January and early February is when organisations are looking to inject momentum and add new team members to accomplish their goals as they seek to grow. So the new year marks a time when there are more job vacancies available to potentially lure away a disillusioned employee. Any workforce that gets wind of a better opportunity just down the road, can leave their old employer without a contingency, an overnight skills shortage; putting pressure on other employees, compromising operational capability and potentially exposing organisations to the increased likelihood of a workplace incident or accident. Worryingly, such a scenario could realistically be the status quo for quite sometime for a business, with the HR department needing to leap into action, and initiate the arduous task of backfilling the role, not to mention time spent waiting for new recruits to serve notice on current employers and then arranging training to get new employees up to speed. And speaking of getting people up to speed, what if that ex-employee was a highly valuable asset within your business, with years of experience? Experience that has been lost undermines a business's short term capability, and could take months, even years, to recover from!
Depollution equipment doesn't operate itself
Formulate A Training Continency
Subsequently, if an organisation hasn't given this any thought, they could be leaving their business open to risk. If they sit on their hands and choose not to act until resignation letters start to pile up on the office desk, it could be too late. The best strategy to combat this is to ensure that more staff than required are always trained and read to go. In fact, consider insisting on all your people being exposed to depollution training. Integrate it into the onboarding or induction process. Spread the training across more people, expand the training to encompass multiple roles, so if the proverbial hits the fan, you have enough people trained to cope. There's a win win for the business because contingency planning guarantees that the skillsets are in the hands of the many and not the few, meaning an organisation is in a better position to cope if or when, staff depart for pastures new. Another great benefit for the business is that by spreading out the depollution training to encompass other roles and positions, your wider staff are exposed to the challenges of the vehicle dismantling process and are able to develop a deeper understanding of a core process to your business model.
Standardised Training
Going further and ensuring training is delivered to a recognised standard is a valuable consideration when backfilling staff. If you realistically expect your people to hit the ground running it is vital that training is delivered to a recognised and agreed standard. This ensures efficiency is built into your vehicle recycling activities and everyone knows what the expectations are because they have been defined. Furthermore, they have all been exposed to the same training so they are all capable of mirroring best practice in order to achieve them.
Foster Employee Loyalty
Remember, long-serving employees have always been the most effective at reaching objectives and providing consistently high-quality work. So, the aim is not to lose them in the first place. But in reality, people will leave an organisation from time to time, even if you are doing everything really well - that's part and parcel of running a business. But it is important to ensure that you are not loosing experienced staff unnecessarily. And that's something that as a training provider, we have been asked to help with on a number of occasions. It has long been accepted that the best employment strategy is to recruit and retain a workforce of dedicated people who know exactly what is required of them, because they have been working for you for a long time and because they feel valued. Don't give your people a reason to look elsewhere. Train them to be the best versions of themselves they can be and allow your business to benefit, not the next!
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