Human Resources
or making the most of what you have
Your company has limited resources. Money, bandwidth, manufacturing, hardware — and people.
People are the most important. Without people, nothing else gets done.
So if people are the key resource, how do we optimize them? Why are so many companies wasting this valuable resource?
What should companies be doing?
First, you have to realize that people are optimizable and you need a focus on making that optimization happen.
This needs to be a granular approach with first level leaders learning both empowering mental models as well as granular skills to execute on those models.
Most leadership training fails because it doesn’t have the appropriate mental models nor the granular skills focus.
Second, we need to understand the main areas where employees want attention and the appropriate cycles for making it happen.
Employees want to understand their jobs, to have good equipment and training, interesting challenges, accolades, workplace friends, caring managers, clear career path, coaching, a like minded team, skill improvement opportunities, and a connection to the companies purpose.
When team leads have the granular training to impact all these areas — engagement goes up along with productivity.
Third, the ROI driver.
How’s this for a pep talk “you will be working with the worst performing team in the company”. This was the intro I got at one company on the first day of work. Six months later, that same exec said “your team is now the best performing team in the company. Their coding throughput went up 40%. How did you do it?”
That throughput increase helped sales, marketing, and operations. It was a win across the board. Could your team use a 40% performance improvement?
Creating these kinds of results isn’t luck. It is a consistent, repeatable process. It’s one that we’ve researched, crafted, and practice in tech companies, race car teams, volunteer organizations, and restaurants. Some of our inputs we learned from the military. Yes, this is a broadly applicable solution.
People are the make or break of your organization.
You are loosing all kinds of revenue and incurring un-necessary expenses by not taking care of them.
They are called “human resources” for a reason. Stop wasting them.
40 Percent Better is the brainchild of two Silicon Valley miracle workers. One spent years helping patients recover from the worst of mental health problems, the other delivered “impossible” software, support, and marketing projects small and large companies. Both used the same core skills and mental models to enable others.