Strategic Efficiency Enrolment – Gaining Efficiencies Without Reducing Headcount

In a downturn people are more important than ever. The challenge for 09? How to make your business efficient whilst looking after your people. In previous downturns, many employers focussed heavily on reducing labour costs as a way of maintaining bottom line performance. Some of these labour reduction strategies lacked dignity and were in retrospect poorly managed. As a result, when the economy recovered, the organisation was left with a major labour problem. Existing employees left as the job market picked up, and the company having developed a reputation as an employer who had failed to look after their employees, found it difficult to attract good people. But of course we can learn from this experience. Reducing head count is not the only, or even often the best way, to reduce expenses. There is a new way – it is called Strategic Efficiency

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Making talent a strategic priority

Another leading discussion by McKinsey's in 2008... The War for Talent never ended. Executives must constantly rethink the way their companies plan to attract, motivate, and retain employees. Companies like to promote the idea that employees are their biggest source of competitive advantage. Yet the astonishing reality is that most of them are as unprepared for the challenge of finding, motivating, and retaining capable workers as they were a decade ago. Ten years after McKinsey conducted its War for Talent research,1 the 1997 study drawing attention to an imminent shortage of executives, the problem remains acute—and if anything has become worse. Companies face a demographic landscape dominated by the looming retirement of baby boomers in the developed world and by a dearth of young people entering the workforce in Western Europe. Meanwhile, question marks remain over the appropriateness of the talent in many emerging markets. Business leaders are deeply concerned, judging by two McKinsey Quarterly global surveys.

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Job market seeks flexibility, creativity

America's Job Market are looking for creativity and flexibility in the workforce in many ways similar to experiences in Australia. Hannah Hoffman explains... The traditional five-year post-graduation plan may need a renovation. University career counselors agree the keys to starting a career in today's economy are flexibility and creativity, not rigid planning. Counselors from the University Career Center, Lundquist College of Business, and School of Journalism and Communication said there are career possibilities for students who have a strategy. Students can use the poor economy as a chance to stand out, they said.

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