Written by: Dr. Raman K Attri, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
If you are a small business owner, you may not be fully shielded from the ongoing talent shortage in the market. Unlike large corporations, you may not have the infrastructure, resources, and cash to sustain yourself. You need to be creative about handling their existing workforce and address talent acquisition challenges.
The talent acquisition and development challenges for small business owners
During the pandemic, I conducted research that showed that small business owners have three challenges.
To hire a talented workforce at a faster rate.
Bringing them up to speed faster than the competition.
To enable current employees to master new skills and become proficient in never-seen-before technologies at a much higher rate.
If we separate the above challenge further, we have a sourcing challenge in hiring. That’s where most businesses hire underqualified employees or employees who are not fully proficient in what they are being hired into. That requires small business owners to address the second challenge to bring them up to speed on job expectations.
While the new workforce is not fully ready to perform the job they are expected to, business owners have no choice but to redevelop or reskill current employees. Sometimes, job redefinition of existing staff may even be required.
We can’t disagree that technologies and business requirements are moving so fast that the existing workforce needs to master new skills more quickly.
Small business owners can do three things to develop the workforce faster
In my book ‘Speed Matters,’ I highlighted that speed, undoubtedly, is the single most competitive advantage for businesses. The pandemic has forced even the best-in-class leaders to rethink how to enable employees to master new skills and new technologies in the shortest possible time. Ironically, small business owners and entrepreneurs are not prepared for or built for speed.
Based on my extensive research across 40 industries with 85 global leaders, I can recommend three areas to master to bring speed to your teams quickly without investing big dollars:
1. Acquire performance support technologies that allow learning in the workflow.
Performance support systems have lately shown that they can speed up skill acquisition tremendously. Be strategic about what technologies to acquire, as not all technologies are built to bring speed to employee development. Small business owners need to invest wisely, and metrics like how a given technology helps speed up employee proficiency should be at the top of their list.
2. Build a speed-enabling ecosystem.
The post-covid recoveries would need a strategic integration of managers, peers, teams, technologies, subject matter experts, and coaches to sync with each other to push for the speed of employee development. Research suggests that traditional training and learning do not seem to work.
3. Highly accountable managers.
The whole delivery model for small businesses revolves around managers, but so little they invest in developing managers or teaching them the right behaviors. To build a speed-savvy culture, small business owners need their managers to take direct involvement in employee training, reinforce the learning with the correct assignments and then be accountable for the outcomes rather than tasks.
Getting There Faster
I would suggest small business owners think about their strategies to build a speed-enabling ecosystem around their teams if they want to stay ahead in their space.
Through two decades of extensive research, I have cracked the code of speeding up workplace learning and performance curve by 200% to allow teams and employees to master the required performance in half the time. Tune into GetThereFaster™ system at http://get-there-faster.com to learn how it can enable your staff to speed up their learning, performance, authority, and leadership in a much shorter time.
Dr. Raman K Attri, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Dr. Raman K Attri is a performance scientist and the world’s leading authority on the science of speed in professional learning and performance. Undeterred by his permanent disability since childhood, he transformed his inability to walk into his niche expertise to teach others how to walk faster in their professional world. Equipped with over two decades of vast research and corporate experience, he guides leaders and professionals on proven strategies to shorten the time to proficiency of the workforce. A prolific author of 20 multi-genre books on business, leadership, training, learning, and performance, he writes about human excellence. As a learning strategist, he innovates state-of-the-art training methodologies to speed up the learning of complex skills at a Fortune 500 technology corporation. As a global training leader, he manages a Hall of the Fame training organization, named one of the top 10 in the world. A highly passionate about accelerated learning since childhood, he earned two doctorates in learning, over 100 international educational credentials, and some of the world’s highest certifications. Among his most recent projects, he has founded the XpertX portal to inspire people to learn the art and science of speed in all walks of their life. As a professional speaker, he speaks at leading international conferences around the globe and shares his research-based insights, and continues to be an inspiring personality.
