Talent Management: Are You Prepared If Your Company Loses a Key Employee?

Recent articles in several business magazines share that one of the most pressing challenges in today’s workplace is finding skilled talent.   This is further exacerbated when one considers that once the talent is found, that person must learn the company’s culture.  This can take a substantial amount of time which goes against your businesses’ need of speed and flexibility.  This situation has an even more profound impact on small businesses which often rely on one person to handle important functions, thereby creating a ‘bottle neck’ effect and increasing business interruption risk. 

The need to find the right talent can be driven by two primary factors:  the loss of someone who had the skills due to injury, retirement, or a competitor and the inability to find and train the skills in house.

We recently had a customer who lost a key employee to a workplace injury.  This employee’s primary responsibility was planning and forecasting.  Without this employee the company basically came to a stand still.  This could not have happened at a worse time as the company just signed a large contract with a global vendor. 

They initially contacted us to help with their safety programs as a result of the injury, and in working with them, we were able to develop human resource programs to cross train their employees to handle the shortage and minimize the possibility of this happening in the future. 

How can you prevent or minimize this business interruption?  By reviewing your safety and human resources programs.  By preventing injuries to your workforce, your company drastically reduces the risk of losing key personnel and eliminates the need to replace key talent.  Human Resources programs help identify cross training opportunities and assists in the development of the training programs, creating a back up in the event something happens to the primary person.  Remember, the ‘back up’ has to have a ‘back up’ as well to support the functions they were performing prior to the initial loss. 

At Enhanced Workforce Solutions, we have extensive experience helping businesses develop their safety and human resource programs and have helped many small companies through the challenging task of developing back-ups to prevent business interruption.