As we\u2019ve said here before, there are two keys to developing an outstanding workforce.\u00a0 First, you have to get the right people on the bus.\u00a0 That is, you have to hire people who have the right attitudes, behaviors, and values to fit well within your organization.\u00a0 As the bus driver, you can\u2019t let just anybody onto your bus.\u00a0 You have to admit only those who will get along well with the people already on the bus.\u00a0 Second, you have to get them seated in the right seat (job).\u00a0 Ideally, you put them in a job for which they have both talent and passion.\u00a0 Right bus, right seat.\u00a0 Makes sense, doesn\u2019t it?\u00a0 So why do we have so many wrong bus\/wrong seat people running around?\u00a0 Probably because we don\u2019t have an employee disaster plan in place.\u00a0 For more on this, please read below.<\/p>\n
What is your employee disaster plan?<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019ve got wrong bus\/wrong seat people on board, it\u2019s possible you have a flawed hiring process that fails to separate the people you want on your bus from those you don\u2019t.\u00a0 But it\u2019s far more likely that you allowed some wrong bus\/wrong seat people to come aboard because you were desperate to fill their positions.\u00a0 You probably wanted<\/span><\/em> to take the time to find Mr. or Ms. Right, but time was the one thing you didn\u2019t have.\u00a0 Therefore, what\u2019s needed here is an employee disaster plan to give you some breathing room so you don\u2019t feel compelled to hire the first person who walks through your door and can fog a mirror.<\/p>\n Any unexpected vacancy can be disruptive.\u00a0 If a particular job wasn\u2019t necessary, you wouldn\u2019t have hired someone to do it, right?\u00a0 But when a key player leaves your organization, the disruption can be severe.\u00a0 So the first step in your employee disaster plan is to identify those people who, if they handed in their two-week notice tomorrow, would really create a disastrous situation.\u00a0 If your company is large enough, you may have some redundancy built into your system where the key players have a number two guy who is just waiting for a shot at the top spot.\u00a0 But smaller companies can rarely afford such a deep talent pool.\u00a0 So what\u2019s a small company to do?<\/p>\n First, make a commitment to yourself that you will hold out for the right bus\/right seat person, however long it takes.\u00a0 Building and maintaining the right team is a long-term commitment, so don\u2019t let a short-term emergency derail it.\u00a0 How you do that will vary from position to position.\u00a0 These days there are temp services for just about everything, so if you believe that could be your stop gap measure for a particular position, do the research now to figure out what temp services provide the sort of people you would need.\u00a0 Or maybe you figure out a way to break up the job and ask others in your organization to share the load until you can find a permanent replacement.\u00a0 Or if it\u2019s within your own skill set, maybe you step into the job yourself until a replacement can be found.\u00a0 And there are probably a dozen other solutions you can think of that would work temporarily to buy you some time to conduct a thorough, thoughtful search for Mr. or Ms. Right.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not suggesting that an employee disaster plan will allow you take the loss of a key employee without missing a beat.\u00a0 On the contrary, the ways you plan to manage through a key vacancy will be messy, disruptive, and in some cases, expensive, but at least will will have a plan and it will buy you the time you need.\u00a0 And as messy disruptive, and expensive as your plan may be, it won\u2019t be nearly as messy, disruptive, and expensive as it will be if you panic and allow Mr. or Ms. Wrong board your bus.\u00a0 If a job is too important to be left vacant for awhile, then clearly it\u2019s too important to be given to the wrong person.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As we\u2019ve said here before, there are two keys to developing an outstanding workforce.\u00a0 First, you have to get the right people on the bus.\u00a0 That is, you have to hire people who have the right attitudes, behaviors, and values to fit well within your organization.\u00a0 As the bus driver, you can\u2019t let just anybody<\/p>\n