The employee, an actor in his staffing
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Estelle
Content manager
November 10, 2020
9 min
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If there is one type of business that suffers particularly severely from the difficulty of retaining talent, it is service companies. Even though the demand for services is still growing, talent (and their skills) is driving the market. And today, turnover in these companies is around 20% (according to an HEC study). The Covid-19 crisis has somewhat changed this balance of power by causing uncertainty to emerge. Naturally, employees are more cautious about the idea of changing companies and the number of departures is decreasing. However, the trend does not seem to be reversed and talent retention remains a key issue for the growth of service companies.
At the same time, these same companies are constantly facing another major challenge, closely linked to the first: project staffing management. Repeated unsatisfactory staffing is one of the main causes of departure of an employee in a service company. According to studies conducted in France with management and IT consulting firms, 44% of French consultants say they are dissatisfied with their Staffing.
Given that staffing management and talent retention are the priority issues for service companies, It is imperative to put the employee back at the heart of the staffing process.
Indeed, why does staffing give the feeling of being suffered by employees? What are the advantages of making the employee an actor in their own staffing? And in a more pragmatic way, how can we intelligently give employees a hand in order to be able to assign them to missions that really meet their aspirations and wishes for development?
No time to read the article? Discover our How to make your employees actors in their staffing.
Let's start with an overview of the direct and indirect benefits of greater employee involvement in their staffing.
An employee who participates in his staffing by indicating his interest in certain missions or by providing key information for his staffing manager (his aspirations in terms of skills development for example) no longer undergoes his assignments and is fully committed to his mission.
A committed and motivated employee is a collaborator who stays! A French IT services company with several hundred employees who has set up a transparent and collaborative staffing process has thus managed to reduce its departures by 13%. When you know that the cost of recruiting a profile in service companies is around €15k (direct & indirect), the return on investment is immediate.
Allowing employees to define their desires facilitates the creation of training plans consistent with their aspirations. This increase in skills is beneficial at 2 levels: for the employee who can thus progress on subjects that interest him, but also for service companies who thus ensure that they can meet the needs of their prospects.
By allowing employees to indicate which projects they are interested in, they will be inclined to update their skills and aspirations profile. The dynamic skills mapping therefore remains up to date, which makes it possible to reduce the staffing time of staffing managers since they can immediately identify the most relevant employees for the projects. It's mechanical and it's a win-win.
Now that you are just as convinced as we are of the benefits of greater involvement of employees in their staffing, let's get to the heart of the matter.
In most service companies, the way staffing works remains very opaque, with few dedicated shared and collaborative tools. It is very difficult for an employee to know the missions that are about to start. Indeed, to know what projects to staff in the future, an employee must regularly ask the question to his manager or staffing manager. This, in addition to making sharing information complicated, can also be poorly perceived internally. For employees who are physically at the customer's house or working from home, these discussions at the coffee machine become impossible. The loss of information is becoming a real problem. ❌
It is therefore, first of all, to set up a shared platform, accessible to all, Staffing management making it possible to offer greater transparency to employees on future projects.
With a view of the staffing needs In progress, the frustration associated with a “black box” staffing process is dispelled. Beyond customer projects, this also allows employees to be informed in real time about current tenders or internal training courses available in the company. Moreover, the feeling of belonging to a company is reinforced when you have the feeling of knowing what is going on there, which is not to be overlooked.
What if deciding on the staffing of a collaborator on a project no longer depended only on his availability and his spectrum of skills? Couldn't we effectively include the aspirations of employees in Staffing choice ? 🤔
That is the idea that we stand for and promote at Napta. Among other things, we give employees the opportunity to specify certain skills as “aspirations”, skills on which they wish to progress and be mobilized during their missions.
Having valuable information about the key skills and aspirations of each employee generates significant positive effects:
1. Involving employees on the projects that interest them the most
2. Suggest a training plan consistent and individualized for each employee.
We are also deeply convinced that the skills of employees are increased mainly in the field, through the missions they carry out. It is therefore necessary to involve employees in projects that are consistent with their development wishes. 🤸
This exercise on aspirations can also work the other way around by avoiding mobilizing an employee on a mission that does not interest him. To do this, it is necessary to capture which skills/subjects he would no longer want to work on in the future.
At Napta, we also give employees the opportunity to express their interest in a Need for staffing coming soon.
For that, nothing could be simpler : collaborator access allows him to have a global view of all the projects likely to start, he can simply view those that correspond to his profile, his wishes, his availability. He can then consult the missions - their descriptions, durations, dates, criteria - and indicate which ones he would like to be positioned on. This mechanism can obviously work for internal projects (calls for tenders, production of commercial proposals) or training courses.
Thus, the manager or the staffing manager obtains crucial information on the preferences of his employees and can then consider, for a given mission, an employee that he did not necessarily have in mind.
Among our customers, we observe that these allocation requests are made in good intelligence. The collaborator will indicate missions that meet his availability, his skills and his aspirations. Since in the end the manager/staffing manager will arbitrate the staffing choices based on the information provided by each employee, this invites them to keep their skills profile up to date.
At Napta, we also noted that 20% of staffing requests had been fulfilled, either by pre-staffing or by a firm commitment, on a sample of 1,500 consultants, in the space of 6 months within an international management consulting firm.
A great success! 🎆
In most service companies, departments and teams are generally always very siloed.
The absence of sharing, in addition to locking employees into a Staffing diagram predefined and immobile, also has another collateral effect: an employee who always works in the same department is less likely to develop skills additional to those required on the majority of projects in his department. This is all the more true when departments/BUs are defined around specific consulting offers (Data, Digital Transformation, HR...). Often, when an employee wants to work for another department, the only space to express it is the annual evaluation interview, where he can specify it to representatives of Human resources or to its hierarchy.
At the same time, to be ever more responsive in its staffing at the organizational level, it is necessary for a service company to be able to mobilize the largest possible network of expertise by promoting cross-staffing (ie. the fact that an employee from department A is mobilized on a mission from department B).
With a solution like Napta, the team in charge of Staffing can fill in all future projects to be staffed, regardless of department, and an employee can therefore indicate his interest in the mission of another department. Of course, it is necessary to set up some rules so that this scheme is beneficial for the organization as a whole: for example, it is possible to set up automated validation systems between departments. Example: as a consultant in department A, if I indicate my interest in a mission in department B, the staffing manager in department A must be able to validate that the consultant can be staffed by the staffing manager in department B. Mobility without disorganization, which also makes it possible to avoid an effect of overload or underload within a department.
1. Activating the feature that allows employees to fill in their key aspirations has allowed service companies to have valuable information about their employees. On average, on Napta, an employee will indicate 7 to 10 skills as aspirations that they want to develop or use during an upcoming mission. Extremely valuable information as we saw earlier. 💎
2. Within the department of a large company, operational managers fill out, every 6 months, information on the projects to be carried out over the period and allow supervised employees to indicate the projects that interest them the most. New rules of the game highly appreciated by their employees! 💚
3. 20% of employees who indicated their interest in at least one project found themselves suggested staffing or were staffed on at least one of the desired projects. 🎯
4. In a large consulting firm with more than 1,000 consultants, more than 220 staffing of consultants outside their home department took place over the last 12 months, representing 11% of total staffing. Until now, cross-staffing was impossible. 🌍
While project staffing is an absolutely crucial issue for service companies today, staffing managers and HR managers have every interest in including employees in the process of Staffing. This makes it possible to offer an employee experience adapted to the ever higher expectations of the latter and to ensure that projects are successful via fully committed teams.
To find out how Napta helps you make your employees involved in their staffing, ask to talk to an expert.
Do you want to go deeper into the subject? We have lots of resources at your disposal to help you go further.
In addition to this subject, find our report”6 tips to become attractive to your consultants again”.
Also discover our guides, templates and checklists in the Resources tab.
See you soon at Napta!
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