One of the most powerful tools available to small business owners is the “Human Capital Audit“. The human capital audit is a process I teach business owners to use, in order to most effectively leverage the specific skill sets, past experience, and core competencies of each and every employee in the company.
For each employee, look at their current roles and responsibilities. Then, identify their core competencies. What are their key strengths? Based on their day-to-day functions, ask yourself which core competencies they are using. It is absolutely critical that each employee be placed in a position in which they are performing ALL of the tasks that they are most skilled at. Where you identify areas for your employees to begin doing new tasks that fall into their skill set “sweet spot”, you need to develop a plan including a time frame to have them implementing these new skills, a set of metrics to measure their performance in these new areas, and identify the resources required to make this new part of their day to day functions a reality.
As you introduce these new skill sets into your people’s repertoires, you need to also determine any contingencies that might affect their ability to perform these tasks, perhaps finding mentors and other training assets you can provide for them.
This is a very easy, highly effective and tremendously powerful tool to leverage in these tough economic times. But to make the human capital audit work for your company, it needs to be implemented across the ENTIRE company, form senior management to front-line personnel, and it has to be developed as a company process that is NOT punitive, but a way to make employees, happier, more engaged in the success of the company, and a means to increase employee retentiaon by aligning their work processes withtheir strengths and interests.
What do you think?