Staff and Contractor Management

It is often argued that the most effective asset any business has - is its people.

This is particularly the case for hire and rental companies.

Staff Deliver your Brand Promise

The biggest differentiators in the hire and rental industry is often service.

Staff play a critical role in this service delivery. If you have a brand promise of for example “ going the extra mile”, it is staff (or even contractors) who actually deliver this promise through their actions and attitudes.

Yes policies, procedures, processes and systems all help deliver a brand promise, but ultimately it gets down to people to people interaction. That is the interaction between your staff and your clients.

Effective Staff Performance Management

Effective management in a small to medium enterprise though is often more difficult than in a large corporation.

The reason is that managers and/ or owners of the business just don’t have the time to be able to undertake detailed human resource management.  Everyone managers and staff included are fully engaged in the days operational activities.

Despite not having the time and resources, small to medium business managers still need to ensure that they effectively manage staff.

However most HR systems to support this though are complex and require significant investment of time to use.

Time that is not available to small to medium business owners.

The Nature of Small to Medium Business Staff Management

Understanding the real nature of small to medium business daily HR management is the key.

Small business staff management is pre-dominantly task driven.  Things need to be done and trusted that they get done.

• Staff tend to know what routine tasks need to be done, they just need to know the where, when and what.
• Adhoc tasks though need to be identified and allocated to staff, once allocated all the manager needs to know is that they are done or what stage they are up too.

Using Task Management

The benefits of using task management to compliment Staff Performance management can be divided in three areas:

Risk Management

In the unfortunate event that a staff member does not work out for a business, industrial relations laws in many countries require that you as the owner can prove it.  The best measure of proof is to be able to demonstrate a failure or inadequacy to perform tasks.  To do the allocated tasks to the person and their completion or performance need to be captured.   The problem is most small businesses simply haven’t got the time to record and document such tasks.  Hence if forced to go to court the small business owner can spend extra-ordinary amounts of time gathering the information.

Self Performance

On the upside many small business staff are incredibly committed, reliable and trustworthy.  They don’t need to have intense supervision they know what tasks need to be done, they just need the information. For example if they are sales staff they know the sales process, they simply need to know what leads have come in, what stage a sale is up too and when it needs to be followed up.

Good staff management practise though would be to give them access to self monitoring their performance against sales targets.  This approach of trust and providing the information and self performance monitoring both improves staff performance whilst reducing demands on management time.

Management Focus

If the first two aspects are provided, then a manager can gain time.  Some of this time can then be focused on managing the business – even having time to spend on the business.

Our Solution

HireEzy our hire software and rental software integrates task management with the HR system.  This enables:

Routine Tasks

Routine tasks are those tasks staff perform regularly. Ideally you want staff just to do these tasks when they are required. To do this staff need to know when they need to be done. For example warehouse staff need to know when items are expected to be collected or returned. If they know this they can plan accordingly. As a manager or owner all you want to know is that staff know about the routine task and have got it in hand. HireEzy provides this information to all staff from the ability to allocate sales leads to sales staff to enabling the logistics staff to know what deliveries/ installations/ dis-assemblies and collections are due on a given day and all requirements for each of them.

Adhoc Tasks

Secondly you want to be able to allocate adhoc tasks to staff and then monitor the progression of that task.   In fact in some cases in small business daily demands may lead many managers forgeting that they allocated a task or staff may forget that they were given one.  HireEzy enables adhoc tasks to be recorded, allocated and monitored  – in fact it does this very well.

Focus On Performance Management

Enabling tasks both routine and adhoc to be more easily managed and monitored means that as a manager you can spend more time on monitoring performance. Having a simple overview of all tasks means that you can quickly identify tasks that are not being completed and take corrective action.  record of issues

Self Performance Management

This applies particularly to sales staff. Sales staff in many companies have a sales quota to meet. They want to know as much as you do if they are meeting those quota targets. HireEzy also enables this, providing both sales staff and managers with a all their booking quotes and actual sales. This data is automatically captured from each quote raise or booking made eliminating double entry whilst providing greater visibility of performance.

Personnel Records

The most common administrative problem facing small to medium businesses is the management of personnel records. HireEzy enables all personnel records to be recorded and stored against each staff member file. This means that documents from letters of engagement, contracts, recognitions and records of performance counseling are stored in one place. Even payments to and payments from a staff member are recorded in many cases automatically, hence eliminating duplicate data entry.

About Us

HireEzy is developed by Making Life Ezy and is available in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and NZ

in Business, Performance management