Business owners who see their staff as a cost rather than an asset fail to recognize how crucially important their workforce is to their bottom line.

In my opinion, the most valuable asset in a company of all niches is its people, whose efficient productivity, knowledge, expertise, and happiness are what generate profit. You’ll get a better return on your investment if you value them and have a human capital strategy that enables you to recognize and engage them.

Every employee in your company needs to be prepared for success. This entails uniting people behind a shared vision, giving them specific objectives to accomplish, and rewarding and recognizing their successes.

In this article, I will share with you 7 steps to maximize your return on people.

 1. Hire the Right People

First and foremost, you must make the right hires because doing otherwise will result in high employee turnover rates and low morale, both of which can be costly for your business.

Look for people whose personalities fit your company culture, so you know they’ll fit in right away, get along with people, and be team players from the beginning.

Asking good questions can occasionally be the first step in better understanding someone’s personality and values.

When you employ people who share your core values, you can be sure that their actions, interpersonal interactions, knowledge and expertise, and customer service will benefit your business.

Having a human capital strategy and hiring loyal employees will save money on turnover costs if you invest in HR or a recruiter.

2. Organize Everyone Around Common Objectives

Have you considered where you want your business to be in a year, three years, or five years?

You should take the time to consider your company’s future and set long-term goals, even though a lot could happen between now and then and big-picture goals could change. You can then go backward to determine how each employee fits into their position.

Furthermore, you won’t be able to develop an operating framework, formulate a business strategy, or unify your team around a common goal if you don’t have a primary target. Without long-term objectives, it will be difficult to decide what your short-term strategy should be.

Employees who have a clear line of sight and specific goals are aware of how their goals affect the goals of their team, department, and the entire organization.

Put it in writing. Writing down your goals greatly improves your chances of accomplishing them. Setting goals and putting them in writing boosts your chances of success by 80%, claims a Harvard study. Additionally, businesses with written goals grew 700 percent faster than those without them.

3. Establish Clear, Timely Benchmarks That Support Company Success

You can resume thinking about short-term goals on a monthly or quarterly basis now that you’ve moved past the difficulties you’ll encounter in the upcoming quarter and taken the time to consider the future of your organization.

Examine your company at the departmental level while keeping your long-term objectives in mind to determine what each department and employee should be doing to help you achieve your aspirational long-term objectives. How can your entire business collaborate to carry out your plan and hit milestones that bring you ever-closer to the big picture?

Assigning smaller (but related) goals to departments, teams, and individuals who all help to achieve the overall operational goals is a concept known as cascading goals.

Cascading goals, which promote alignment between an organization’s goals and employees’ roles, are an essential component of a lean business model and aid in igniting worker engagement and productivity.

Establish short-term objectives for each department and employee in collaboration with your department leaders. These objectives should be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely) in order to give your employees a clear direction to work toward and to move your business forward as a whole.

4. Monitor Your Progress and ROI

You won’t even be able to tell whether your business and its employees are moving in the right or wrong direction if you can’t measure and monitor your progress. Business leaders must monitor a number of financial reports, market developments, and key performance indicators (KPIs), but some of these can be used specifically to monitor the development and return on investment of your human capital strategy.

You can find a number of graphs and KPIs on your company’s People Scorecard that will assist you in formulating objectives, policies, and reward/compensation/recognition programs that actively engage your workforce.

Track the following KPIs to determine your return on investment in human capital:

• Revenue Per Hour Paid – Displays the overall revenue that your employees produced. This can also show your onboarding effectiveness and cost of turnover.

• Paying Labor Costs Per Hour – Shows all labor costs, including “hidden” costs.
• ROI on Total Labor Cost – Indicates the amount of income that labor costs produce.

Additionally, by putting in place the appropriate accounting and time tracking systems, you can respond to queries like:

• Net Income Per Employee: How healthy is your staff to revenue ratio?
• Compensation Per Employee – Pay attention to how this figure changes once you start paying people based on the revenue they produce.
• How much revenue does each $1 of compensation produce as a percentage of total revenue? Are your organization’s compensation standards in line with industry norms and with the objectives of the company?

If you want to know if your organization is developing its people in the right way over a longer time frame, you can look at trends in each of these metrics. Utilize the data to enhance your human capital strategy and assess the effectiveness of changes as they are made.

5. Reward and acknowledge top performers

Never pass up the chance to use positive reinforcement when your KPIs show that certain employees within your company have demonstrated exceptional performance and achievement.

A combination of monetary compensation or bonuses and peer recognition is the most effective way to promote high productivity.

According to a study on workplace engagement by the Society of Human Resource Manager, organizations with employee recognition programs and sound career development advice saw a 63 percent increase in employee productivity and a 58 percent increase in their profit margins.

By incorporating this type of recognition and reward system into your human capital strategy, you can not only motivate high-performing employees to keep working hard but also their coworkers to do the same.

Your ROI will increase if your staff members are constantly driven to work harder and be more productive during billable hours (even if you spend a little more on bonuses).

6. Learn how to make lower performers better.

You can see who could be performing better in your company when you can identify the top performers. Examine the day-to-day activities of your most productive employees. What is the procedure? What is their schedule? What methods do they employ to accomplish their objectives?

Your bottom line will be affected, I promise. According to research, American workers in small businesses waste more than 2 hours a day at work on average. The annual lost productivity comes to almost $700 billion! Keeping them inspired and increasing productivity by even just 15 minutes a day can increase earnings by thousands of dollars.

By using the model presented by your top performers, you can make your just-okay employees into good employees and your good employees into super-star employees. Your ROI will then start to increase.

7. Adjust Goals and Repeat

You’ll be able to see how your policies and human capital strategy impact trends in your financial management reports when you regularly set short-term goals and actively monitor employee performance.

When you notice that something is going well, consider whether you could improve or whether the favorable trend will continue. On the other hand, act quickly if you notice that your numbers are trending the wrong way.

Set up routine leadership meetings with the department heads so that you can collaborate to recognize productivity and address issues before they have a chance to fester and become significant obstacles.

Conclusion,

To sum up, maximizing your return on people is a challenging duty. But if you want to unlock employee training’s ROI, you can find a strategic partners who can coach you to realize your vision while helping you with training and get the highest ROI on employees.

With the aid of efficient employee training procedures, Satom has assisted executives and business owners in achieving their organizational objectives. We use methods that are tailored to your particular team and business needs and are goal-oriented. To find out more, contact us at hello@satom.vc.