Business owners and human resource managers are getting increasingly worried about their workers’ ability to continually meet day-to-day expectations in line with the production demands of the fast-moving workplace. Statistics reveal that the average employee is productive for about 3 working hours per day. This accounts for less than 50% of an 8-hour work schedule and leaves you with five paid working hours of little to no productivity. Several means to improve this reality are churned out every other day, from productivity formulas, seminars, and masterclasses to rules that help check workplace distractions.
Many employees believe their company should provide more training to aid their upskilling. They get fatigued when they do not possess all the skills required to simplify seemingly complex workplace tasks, and this, from experience, can lead to a slow and unmotivated worker. To easily identify such workers and their areas of need, you would require skills management software.
What is Skills Management Software?
Skills management software is a skill-tracking tool that refers to programs developed to aid organizations check the development of their employees. Periodic assessment of employees, identification of gaps, and better business decisions are some of the uses of skill management software.
Why use Skill-Tracking Tools?
Matching Job Roles to People with the Appropriate Skill Set
The first thing a skills management tool would do for your business is to match skills to different roles in your company. Every position comes with a job description and skill requirements. Sometimes these roles and their skill requisites are mismatched. Mismatching job roles and skills often affect the efficiency of the recruitment process. An employee who finds himself in a position he is not suited for is likely to face struggles with meeting the expectations of his office.
Employing a skill-tracking tool will ensure that each role is matched to the skills required to fill it. It would also eliminate the possibility of over-utilizing certain employees at the expense of others.
Discovering Loopholes in Employee Training
Many organizations expect their employees at the point of recruitment to know how things operate in the role. As a result of this assumption, little to no training structures are put in place to cater for employee development.
The outcome of this would be a case of several employees with different skill levels depending on the depth of the training they had been subject to before their employment. In most cases, you end up with one or two who might have missed some of the basics, which affects their workplace productivity.
With a skill-tracking tool, you can identify these gaps and take the necessary steps to fill them via new training or fresh recruitment for that role.
Enhanced Learning Programs and Employee Retention.
With skill management software, you can assign employees courses and training relevant to their skills while keeping track of their progress. This ensures that the right people receive the training they need for their job requirements. When your workforce receives continuous development and training, they feel valued and will be more willing to stay with your company. This improves retention rates and saves your company the stress of constantly recruiting.
Identifying Employee Strengths and Weaknesses
With a skill-tracking tool, you can discover the areas of strength and weakness for each of your employees.Identifying employee strengths and weaknesses would improve productivity when the right person is in charge of the assignment at hand- that is, you can discover which employees are better suited to a particular task and which ones are not.
Allows Employees to Operate at the Highest Industry Standards
Change is the only constant thing in the world, and systems, processes, and work equipment are not spared. As small business that wishes to remain relevant, your employees must operate at the highest industry standards.
With skill-tracking, you can constantly upskill your staff in their various positions to meet up with all that is currently obtainable within the industry. Skill management software can also help you draft standard processes to assess employees’ skill sets regularly. Constantly evolving employees will lead to an improvement in operations and the long-run productivity of the company.
Increases Workplace Productivity
As was discussed earlier, employees spend more than half of their day on non-work-related things, which hampers their workplace productivity. Part of the reason for this is an unhappy and tired workforce struggling to meet the demands of the tasks they have to carry out.
In a survey, over 70% of the U.S. workforce believe they have more to offer than they currently do. Skill-tracking tools can help to identify this need for growth and ensure an overall increase in the level at which each employee operates. You can then introduce fresh training and refresher courses.
You can also track the growth rate of each one of your employees (which ones have improved and who require more training) via a tracking tool. This will lead to a general rise in the work rate and productivity of the organization.
Competitive Advantage for both Employees and the Organization
Operating in a competitive industry means your market share is constantly threatened, and your company must operate at the highest possible standards.
To keep your market share and operate at the highest possible standards, your employees must work smarter and faster than their peers in the competition. With a skill-tracking tool, you can identify faster and simpler ways to complete tasks, creating room for more work in equal or less time.
Completing tasks faster would also ensure employees earn more time for leisure and non-work-related activities. A happier workforce will more than likely translate to a more productive one.
You can track employee skills efficiently using the right tools. The skill management and tracking software you choose must achieve operational excellence through an intentional approach to tracking and validating staff abilities, talents, and experiences. Invest in software that enables you to see the skills of your employees, spot skill gaps, strategically plan for training, mobilize talent, and make plans for the future of work.
Michael Zhou is a Senior VP of Business Intelligence Development and has assisted the Fortune 1000 company with expertise in the web as a whole, including ground-zero marketing efforts that benefit both consumer and vendor. He is also a contributor on Esprittoday.
Skill-tracking stock image by Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock