Efficiency

By Julie Kuepers (Senior Digital Content Strategist at Click Boarding)

As one of the most globally recognized brands in the world, this client had challenges within one of its biggest hiring profit centers in Sales. Their prior decentralized Talent Acquisition structure placed a heavy staffing burden on line managers who struggled to get the hiring results and achieve a balance between staffing and their functional business responsibilities. This combination of missed hires and lost productivity time from line leadership put revenue at risk. In 2013, this client turned to Sevenstep to drive a laser-focused TA strategy for this high impact hiring area.

All businesses are a sum of their employees and HR, yet numerous organisations struggle to understand their staff, their needs and retention rates.

Many organisations are focused on increasing profits, through decreasing inefficiencies, therefore saving both time and money in the long-term, but how can you do this in a function as important as HR?

Increasing HR can be difficult at the best of times, which is what makes HR systems so appealing. As a centralised place for organisations to manage people-related functions and processes, HR systems are almost a 'no-brainer'.

Many organisations embarking on an enterprise-wide transformation to agile working, struggle to sustain or scale the benefits they initially achieve. The journey towards agility is a marathon, not a sprint, and it requires continued commitment, at all levels of the organisation, to ensure agile ways of working stick.

The first six to 12 months of introducing agile throughout an organisation will result in visible improvements in speed to market, productivity, efficiency and employee engagement.  

Large corporates are, at best, 30% efficient in delivering change. From launching a loan product to landing a new bakery range on a supermarket shelf, big organisations are failing to deliver change at pace and realise value from it.

One leading credit card provider told us they’d last delivered a major new product eight years ago. ‘We were the leader in the market,' said the project manager. 'However, others have caught up and now we’re struggling to respond.’

'It takes us two years to do what our competitors can do in two months.' MD - FTSE100 organisation

Recently I was asked to speak at a leadership event for representatives from all over NHS Scotland, to share some examples of what we had experienced as the critical success factors for delivering improvements in organisations, to ensure lasting results.

Upon reflection, it certainly felt that the 10 factors to deliver sustainable improvements, had a lot of resonance with the challenges and the opportunities the NHS faces at 70.

Growing up we are taught (and throughout life we observe) what is frequently referred to as the Golden Rule. For many of us it started as (and maybe still is) the phrase "do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, and while the exact wording is flexible the central message is common to all.

In principle, the concept champions a two-way, reciprocal and mutual relationship between two or more parties.

This indeed is a very admirable idea, but it has a fundamental flaw that is amplified when brought into the workplace.