Business Anti-Biotic during a Recession – Chapter 1 Strategies to Manage Understaffed Teams due to Brain-drain
Brain drain is the migration of highly trained or qualified personnel, in search of the better standard of living and quality of life, higher salaries, access to advanced technology and more stable political conditions in different places worldwide.
Evidence indicates, however, that low-income countries are disproportionately affected by the exodus of yo u n g , skilled p e o p l e. Unemployment, lack of opportunity, and economic growth remain among the topmost reasons as to why people migrate.
The development of any country depends on its human capital. Similarly, the success of any organization hinges on the performance of its competent workforce. Due to the status of Sri-Lanka’s Socio-Political and Economic climate, the question is whether this qualified workforce will remain in Sri Lanka? Many of the professionals are desirous of leaving the country due to many reasons, including, but not limited to, economic turndowns, coups and political instability, thoughtless bureaucracy, the absence of national policies aimed at development, bribery, and corruption. This was any way a common phenomenon for Sri Lanka which now has accelerated drastically.
Sri Lanka Opinion Tracker Survey (SLOTS) data indicates that 27% of Sri Lankans would like to emigrate if they had the chance, with the young and the educated wanting to migrate the most. In such a context, managing human resources in organizations undoubtedly will be a greater challenge for any business leader.
With increasing job resignations due to migration, many organizations are short-staffed. When just a few employees resign, their workload can usually be redistributed among the remaining employees, this sometimes done to manage recruitment costs. Indeed, resources abound to help functional heads fairly divide workload and to help employees manage the increased workload. However, as departments of 50 become departments of 35 and teams of 10 become teams of 7, workload redistribution is an untenable longterm solution.
In addition to redistributing work, there are a couple common solutions for staffing shortages: hiring replacement employees and outsourcing lower-level tasks. But amid the Great Resignation’s persistent talent shortage, many business heads are finding that their usual go-to solutions are not enough.
Therefore, Business heads should explore ways to manage such situations while maintaining the work life balance and the motivation of their team members. As HBR (Harvard
Business Review) discussed, few strategies can be used for managers struggling with understaffed teams.
Relook at Team members’ Calendar
One of the fastest ways to turn high performers into low performers is to allocate their time to so many different projects that they do not have time to think deeply. For example, as per one of my colleagues in IT sector , as the number of Project leads decreases , one historically high-performing Project Manager found herself spending 10% of her time on each of 10 major project teams — with no time to spare for her individual job responsibilities. The result was weekly calendars full of double-booked meetings, multiple frustrated teams, and poor results.
It is critical to prioritize tasks and defer what you can. For example, does there really need to be a system upgrade every year, or is every other year fine? What you cannot defer needs to be implemented more strategically and scheduled more carefully — preferably sequentially. Although it can be tempting to fight over scarce resources and demand your jobs to be done are the priority, as a Manager or functional head, it is more important to get employees’ focused effort rather than clock time. Stated differently, do not just grab for whatever you can get — help employees be their best.
Prioritize Core Customers’ Needs
Traditional business teaching emphasizes the importance of having a diverse of customers and products to minimize risk and make your business stronger. Indeed, focusing on only a few big clients is potentially risky. However, when you are in a situation where you cannot manage your entire customer base well, giving everyone a little may prompt important unsatisfied customers to move on.
It’s a reoccurring theme across many industries ( e. g . , Manufacturing, Retailing, and Health care) that the number of products, customers, or patients that an employee is expected to manage has significantly increased — sometimes even doubling or tripling. For example, an account manager who two years ago was expected to manage about 4 accounts now has a load of 15 accounts to manage. This has reduced quality time spent on each key account, like conducting account audits, evaluating account performance etc. No account was getting a proper focus and the employee was working long hours and constantly under tremendous pressure. Unsurprisingly, they just accepted a new job.
Sometimes prioritizing customers involves rationalizing the base as well. For example, does every key account really need a visit every week, or might some be satisfied with a visit every other week. If not, you may need to prioritize your core account over having a large base.
Find Quick Effective Fixes
Look for interventions that can substantively improve employees’ daily work and be mastered in less than a week. For example, are there ways to automate data entry, such as converting excel sheets into Power BI dashboards. Could training employees to operate in Power BI or handle Advanced Excel save hours of manual computations? Could three levels of approval be reduced to one, or could the rupee amount requiring approval be increased? Could a share-point repository be used to save, the project lead’s hours of integrating feedback from 10 people’s emails?
Alternatively, if it is the less-frequent tasks — for example, monthly sales or performance reports — that are the distresses of your employees’ existence, try to make any process improvement intervention even shorter (ideally, a day or less). If you can, bring in external consultants or 3rd party human resources to manage much of the design and rollout the interventions to avoid further overwhelming an already overstretched workforce. Although investing in process improvement may be expensive, it is likely much cheaper than recruiting, training, and managing a revolving door of employees who are all frustrated by broken processes.
In short, Thanks to staffing shortages due to immigration, many employees’ workloads have increased to untenable levels. For the workplaces running on a skeleton crew, now is the time to implement process improvement interventions, prioritize your core customers and products, and assign your employees to fewer concurrent tasks — not more.