Surviving Tough Times by Investing in the Future
Companies are facing a myriad of challenges, ranging from labour shortages to increasing costs of supplies to heightened concerns amongst consumers about the environmental impact of the products and services that they buy.
From tourism companies to multinational banks, these challenges affect firms regardless of their specific characteristics. How should firms respond to them? Fortunately, various mechanisms exist that can enable firms to survive and thrive in these most demanding of times. Key amongst them are investing in employees, using technology more, and offering new products or services. In any company, a mix is likely to be needed.
Investing in Employees
By investing and training their employees and by providing workers with opportunities to use their new skills, companies can make their workplaces more attractive places to work, helping them to both recruit and retain key employees. Employees often appreciate the opportunities to gain new capabilities that can unlock additional responsibilities for them, enabling them to vary their activities and strengthen their contribution to their employer. Indeed, by enhancing employees’ skills, training can increase workers’ productivity, enabling the firm to achieve more with the same number of employees. Training can focus on ‘hard skills’, such as finance, logistics or human resource management, or it can seek to develop ‘soft skills’, including leadership, coaching, and presentation skills. The training should seek to boost employees’ efficiency by deepening their existing functional skills and by helping them to gain new perspectives on how to complete their work. In addition, training should seek to prepare employees for the next stage in their careers within the organization by giving them with insights into their own personalities and how work individually and with others.
Using Technology More
Technology can often refer to emerging computer-based developments, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality or augmented reality, but it need not do. Adopting relatively simple customer relationship management tools that can enable small firms, for example, to track enquiries to the firm, glean some insights into emerging market trends and spot new market opportunities can be invaluable. Technology in the form of algorit