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Helping Your People Get Back in Business

from Unit4 Communications February 11, 2022 | 3 min read

Businesses and people everywhere are starting to get to grips with a long-term plan for a new way of working. So we thought we’d give you a little look at what you can do to help your people adjust to an entirely new approach to doing their jobs, looking after their families, and relating to their company and their customers.

For most of the past 2 years, people have been focusing on their families and trying to get used to a ‘new normal’ and work, for many, has had to take a bit of a back seat for a while because it’s been quiet or they have not been able to work for lots of reasons. Now, slowly but surely, things are getting a bit easier – offices are reopening, and business velocity is beginning to surpass its pre-pandemic levels. We believe there will be a need to re-engage your people, to energize and motivate them in a way that will ensure both their retention and a commitment to meeting the goals and objectives of the business.

A few things to think about:

Welcome Back

Not just for new starters – a new onboarding to welcome your people back to work. Think about organizing a Welcome Back session, recognize the challenges we’ve been through, thank your people for their resilience, revisit key objectives, reinforce key strategies to help the business get back on track, and offer any training that people may feel they need to get back to work as well as regular 1:1’s with their line managers. Make it fun, welcoming, and authentic.

Re-Evaluate

This is an ideal opportunity to understand their personal goals and what motivates them. This could well have changed and may make them more vulnerable to competitive approaches or even a change in career direction. Set up 1:1’s with managers for soon after your people get back to work, structure these so that they are supportive and make sure you have some measures in place to action on the support you can give people. Retaining talent is key for people-centric organizations so make sure your people feel valued by understanding what they need from the business. Through the use of live and interactive ‘pulse’ analysis it is now possible to understand better how someone is feeling. This can alert us that a person may be feeling unhappy or dis-engaged from the business (even if it is just by not responding) enabling conversations to take place, and measures to be enacted.

Work is something we do, not somewhere we go

If nothing else we have learnt that business can be conducted in a different way – more mobile, at different times, with different processes. Flexibility is key and this could well have a significant impact on the bottom line, reducing the amount of travel as well as boosting productivity rates. It’s been proven time and time again. Increasingly, employees value flexibility as highly as their reward package. Good salaries are no longer enough, we want a healthy work/life balance – something that is even more important in these times.

Offering flexible working, even to those who are in a more traditional office-based role, can lead to the following benefits…

Reduces the stress associated with travel
Reduces absence
Increases employee retention
Minimises the cost of replacing people
Reduces carbon emissions
May reduce the office space needed
Can make the business more attractive to people looking for flexibility

Deploying a cloud-based solution delivers anywhere/anytime capability and enables your people to work when and where is most right for them. It delivers the flexibility your people will demand, enabling them to structure their working patterns around their commitments to family. The reduction in stress this affords can have a significant impact on stress related absence and offers the wellness that all companies should be providing to their employees. It encourages retention and makes for a more attractive environment to potential employees.

Let technology take care of the grunt work so you can focus on more important things

We all have tasks that are repetitive and often mundane – but still important. Helping your teams to focus on the work that matters by automating everything else can improve employee experience, help boost staff retention, and allow them to invest their energies in both service delivery and innovation.

At Unit4, we’re creating solutions that can help you achieve this level of automation – delivering intuitive and easy to use conversational mobile technology with digital assistants such as Wanda, using AI technology to read and speed the processing of expense receipts, and reducing the effort required to record time against projects. All of which contribute to greater accuracy and more timely delivery of information. This speeds up billing processes and reduces errors and queries – all resulting in less time spent by both front line and back-office staff.

Resource Right

Having the right people on the right project at the right time. Significant cost can be avoided, and margins increased by understanding skill sets and the type of people best suited when resourcing a project. Having the wrong person on a project can lead to:

Dissatisfied customers
Non-payment of bills
Negative impact on cash flow
An increase in the workload on finance and management, distracting them from the value-added work
Customer and therefore revenue loss
Providing competition with ammunition to win other bids
Making it more costly to win bids
Unhappy customers can lead to unhappy staff – who leave = cost of replacement, loss of knowledge …

Resourcing projects has always been a manually labor-intensive activity, with decisions on the right people to assign to a project placed in the hands of a limited number of people whose view of the resource pool is limited by their knowledge and personal experience. Not only can technology with embedded AI review all the available workforce across the globe, it can quickly define those that have the best combination of skills and that have produced the best results for this type of project. Resourcing not only becomes faster and more comprehensive by ensuring people are working on the best projects for them. It also leads to happier, more satisfied, and better engaged employees.

How can Unit4 help you?

Our cloud-based ERP, HCM, and FP&A solutions have been designed over the course of 40 years working with people- and service-centric organizations. Their next-generation capabilities allow your people to make intelligent decisions around hiring, resourcing, training, staffing, and other operational matters quickly and efficiently – letting them get on with the job of doing their job. To learn more about how we can help you create an environment that lets your people transition into a more stable new normal, check out our dedicated product pages here.