• How Employee Engagement Impacts the Bottom Line

• ·         Employee engagement has been a buzzword in the training community for years. But what does it actually mean, how much should a company invest in this engagement and does it actually affect the bottom line of a business?

  According to Consumer Insight, employee engagement is “the extent to which employees feel passionate about their jobs, are committed to the organization and put discretionary effort into their work.” By this definition, maximum employee engagement should be every human resource professional’s goal. Employees who are passionate about their job, are committed to the organization and put the most effort possible into their work will produce a higher quality and quantity of work than their peers, translating to an increase in the bottom line.

  Investing in Human Capital

  It’s important as an L&D professional to realize there is a training gap in today’s workforce. It’s also important for each professional to do his or her best to close this gap by encouraging and educating businesses and other industry professionals to make a change.

  Consider these statistics:

  ·         The 2015 Manpower Talent Shortage Survey indicated that approximately 20 percent of businesses offered training to their employees.

  ·         In the latest PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of nearly 1,350 CEOs, 73 percent ranked skill shortages as the greatest threat to their companies, a 10 percent jump from the 2014 results.

  ·         Deloitte’s 2015 Global Human Capital Trends report found that 85 percent of the 3,300 business and HR executives surveyed rated the talent challenge as “very important” or “important,” a 21 percent increase from 2014’s results. However, only 28 percent of those surveyed said their businesses are prepared to deal with this talent deficit.

  Organizations must see investment in human capital as a key business strategy that will improve productivity, performance and profits. They often forget that training and development is a long-term investment, not an expense. The best way to show this to leadership is through detailed examples that include hard data.

  For example, AAMCO opened a state-of-the-art training center called AAMCO University in spring 2015. By the end of the first quarter of 2016, the company had received more deposit agreements to open new centers than the brand did for the entire previous year. Over 50 percent of deposits for new centers came from existing franchisees.

  Technicians and customer service managers who participate in AAMCO University increase their skillsets and, in turn, the quality of their repair work and center profitability. Ultimately, the AAMCO centers run more efficiently, allowing franchisees the opportunity to expand their portfolios by opening additional AAMCO locations.

  Training industry professionals must use examples like this one to inform, advise and ultimately push an organization’s leadership to see human capital as an important long-term investment.

  Developing Engaged Employees by Teaching Value

  Once leadership views training as an investment and not an expense, professionals must take the necessary steps to develop engaged employees in order for them to be successful and contribute to the bottom line.

  Research prepared for the United Kingdom government found that companies with a highly engaged workforce experience a 19.2 percent growth in operating income over a 12-month period. Conversely, unengaged workers can cost an organization. McLean & Company found that a disengaged employee costs an organization approximately $3,400 for every $10,000 in annual salary. Disengaged employees cost the American economy up to $350 billion per year due to lost productivity.

  Developing engaged employees begins with a dissemination of information. Employees must understand how training will benefit them, and the company, in the long run and how a lesson will offer real-world value. Stressing the personal value of what employees are about to learn, such as the potential for future promotion, can help increase attention spans and turn employees into active learners.

  Measure Gains

  In business, investments often take several years before showing a return; however, companies can see the return on their training investment much sooner. Realizing the return on investment is one of the top reasons company leaders are more apt to increase training and development budgets, but only if the earned gains are measured.

  In addition to a brand’s own profits, professionals should measure their competitors’ growth and compare it against their own. While profit gain may only equate to a few percentage points over a year, if a brand is growing faster than its top competitors because of an investment in training, the data is more significant to leadership because it shows the business is healthier than its competitors. It’s also important to think outside the box and gather other metrics, including customer loyalty, productivity and employee turnover. These metrics are all key performance indicators for any healthy and successful business.

  An engaged workforce has unlimited potential for producing top earnings, as long as the workers continue to stay passionate and committed to the business. Training professionals must also stay engaged, dedicated and passionate about their job and profession in order to help their companies boost the bottom line.

  Brian O’Donnell 

How to Balance Hard Skills and Soft Skills Training

• When you run a business or work in human resource management, you know that developing your employees and improving their skills and expertise is going to be helpful for you in the long run. However, what is often missed when developing lower-level staff and administrative professionals is that training should not only focus on “hard skills,” such as computer software packages or technical qualifications; soft skills are important, too, for all levels of employees.

  For many years, it has seemed that employers around the world focus on providing these people skills only to those at a higher level in the company: managers, supervisors and others who make decisions. The employees who work within the other parts of the business, such as PAs and administrative staff, are given more technical skills training.

  This is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make; in fact, ensuring that all staff members receive access to soft skills training is vital in HR planning. All employees can improve their performance, interact better inside and outside the organization, and develop skills for promotion and succession planning.

  Not only will soft skills training help when it comes to succession planning, but it will also improve motivation across the entire organization and create a more harmonized, cooperative working environment.

  Which soft skills training courses are key?

  Now that you know that soft skills training can be hugely beneficial across your company, you likely want to know more about which courses may be a good idea to plan.

  Soft skills are essentially people skills, methods and strategies that we can use to have better, more positive interactions with those around us. However, they can also teach us about our approaches to work.

  Some of the most worthwhile courses to offer in your workplace include:

  ·         Communication Skills

  ·         Leadership Skills

  ·         Time Management

  ·         Team-Working

  ·         Problem-Solving

  ·         Change Management

  Soft skills can benefit each and every employee in your business. You should offer them across the organization and encourage staff to attend them.

  We shouldn’t forget about hard skills, though, right?

  Of course not. While soft skills training teaches employees how to cope, deal and react in a situation, hard skills training gives them all the vital knowledge and skills that they need to actually get the job done.

  Many popular hard skills courses include:

  ·         Languages

  ·         Computer Programming

  ·         Data Analysis

  ·         Mathematics

  ·         Microsoft Office Training

  Not every type of hard skill course is suitable for every employee, and you should ensure that the right staff have the right access to training courses. That said, if you have employees who show an interest in a training course outside of their job role, you should not stop them from learning more to develop themselves.

  If you have employees embarking on administrative careers, why not offer them a more modern, competency-focused form of administrative and PA courses that cover a wide range of soft skills? You’ll develop staff that are not only qualified to perform their roles but also can come together to create a harmonised office, too.

  Your business will thank you for it in the long run – as will your employees.

  BY JOAN TANNER

The Story of Risk

Our Natural Inclinations

Every day of our lives we sum up situations and make decisions. Sometimes we make the right decisions and other times our decisions are less than optimal. Our decision making can be active and passive. Sometimes we decide to do something and other times we choose not to do something. Sometimes the passive choice is not a conscious choice but merely an omission.

Influencing the Outcomes of Our Daily Lives

There is so much more happening in our daily lives. We take more chances than our ancestors ever did. Just think of driving in a car or of children and electricity. We live in an information age - in a world that has many more people than yester-year. How often do we stop to consider whether our children know how to get out of the home if there is a fire.

Opportunities and Winners

In the early days of merchants and trading, people very quickly analysed the upside and down-side of business opportunities. Risk was recognised as an opportunity. There would be some people that would gravitate away from risky ventures and others who would discover ways to influence outcomes and seize the opportunity. Those who were able to identify the opportunities to influence outcomes usually tended to be more successful.

Influencing Outcomes

There are many situations that we cannot prevent. In some cases such as storms at sea we may not even be able to have any influence over the outcome. So insurance derived its origins from the concept of the many paying for the few. Given the comfort that this provided, merchants were able to take greater chances resulting in greater benefits.

Evolution of Risk Management

None knew better than insurers of what could happen and what could go wrong. This was because the business of insurance lay in paying for losses incurred by customers. In order for insurers to be viable there needed to be a way of encouraging customers to exercise reasonable care and by rewarding good performance. And so risk management evolved from natural intuition and analytical thinking into a more formal process of communication of the actions to influence outcomes. In other words how carefully opportunities were being managed.

Managing Performance

Today businesses are larger and more competitive than ever before. Society is far less tolerant of poor performance. Government services are subject to increased publicity and public scrutiny - voters punish poor performance. Globalisation of communication and trading has lead to the endless pursuit of competitive edge. The demand for quality service and value has led to diminishing margins for error. Investors are demanding more and more information on how companies are managed. Borrowing money has become ever more competitive and linked to sound management of opportunities. Share prices reward organisations that not only deliver results but install confidence in the future by demonstrating care and diligence.

Managing Confidence

Managing confidence is the challenge of business and governments beyond 2000. The very notion of confidence relates to trust and predictability. It also focuses on stakeholders who by their very perceptions of predictability/confidence/risk will exert ever-increasing influence by punishing unpredictability and increasingly rewarding the generation of confidence. It goes without saying that the best cure is prevention and in cases where outcomes are subject to pure uncontrollable chance such as earthquakes, the generation of confidence through demonstrating preparedness for the unexpected.

Managing Success

If we can understand the pulse of risk and understand its delicate balance with opportunity we can influence outcomes and increase the chance of achieving our objectives whether they be individual, corporate or community. So we need to make the right choices and do the right things free of omissions by taking care. This is all about strategic thinking, analysing and attention to detail. Strategic thinking is one thing but converting it into the right action is what separates winners from losers. After all, who would you leave your children or your money with - someone who takes care or someone who cuts corners? The common sense laws of everyday life are the keys to the logic of business. Risk management is so simple that it is almost impossible to describe.

This is the story of managing outcomes through doing the right things and building confidence. You could even shift the paradigm and call it managing success.

So what we really are talking about is the phenomenon of risk.

By Jonathan Sesel

CURTESY ROTIMI OLUKOREDE

SMALL BUSINESS INSURANCE PRIMER

It can be difficult to determine which kind of insurance you need for your small business. Different types of insurance have confusingly similar names; your state, town, or county may have its own insurance requirements; and many industries have coverage specific to them.

Insurance is one of the most neglected small business responsibilities. Not having the appropriate insurance for your small business is a mistake because a disaster can shut down your company permanently, or at least wreak havoc on your assets.

The Insurance Information Institute (III) in New York City estimates that about 40 percent of small business owners have no insurance at all, because many falsely believe they can't afford coverage. The truth is a small business can't afford not to have adequate insurance. Without insurance, you're unnecessarily putting your livelihood at risk. That's also why many landlords, suppliers, and other entities you work with will probably require you to have coverage.

If you're having difficulty determining which kind of insurance your business should have, you might want to check with the following agencies:

• The county or city clerk
• A local chapter of your industry association
• The state insurance office

Below are some of the different types of insurance small businesses use. Click on the type of insurance to get a more detailed description.

Insurance for Your Business

• Business Owner's Policy
• General Liability Insurance
• Property Insurance
• Professional Liability (Errors & Omissions) Insurance
• Commercial Automobile Insurance
• Umbrella Insurance
• Business Income/Extra Expense Insurance
• Product Liability Insurance
• Extra Equipment Insurance
• Specialized Equipment Insurance

Insurance for You and Your Employees

• Health Insurance
• Disability Insurance
• Life Insurance
• Keyman Insurance
• Workers' Compensation Insurance

CURTESY:   http://nigeria.smetoolkit.org/nigeria/en/content/en/34/Small-Business-Insurance-Primer

WITHOUT A SALES STRATEGY AND STRATEGIC SALES FORCE YOU ARE DOOMED TO FAIL

Too often too many businesses procrastinate when faced with heavy pressure from competitors – global or regional, many of whom compete solely on price. Competing on price is often a desperate way out.

We know that many sales leaders are burdened by the ever-present pressure to achieve short to medium term value / volume quotas, often complaining that there isn’t enough time to develop a sales strategy.

The usual mantra from these groups is a cry for more productivity, more action, better selling techniques and less discounting. All admirable sentiments, but without a strategy, all a useless attempt to achieve a dream.

When challenged, some sales leaders readily admit that they need a sales strategy, but that the pressure to meet shorter-terms targets and their heavy involvement in day-to-day operational issues (even if these do relate to sales) means that sales strategy takes a back seat. This is a very dangerous attitude to take.

We understand that more and more, the high cost of selling, longer lead times, multiple choices, maturing markets, rampant competition and diminishing differentiation, is taking its toll on sales performance. We understand that salespeople are being squeezed to produce more sales revenue / volumes, at better margins, but corporate return on sales effort, isn’t what it used to be.

In response to the pressures of a decline in demand and pressure to reduce selling prices (on the buying side), and a push for greater volume at better margin, in the face of increasing competition (on the supply side), companies have sought to cut costs. Organisations have looked for ways to be more efficient, production, logistics and operations all looked for ways to be more streamlined, finance pulled back, cut credit lines and reined in spending.

All credible actions but the one area that really needed an overhaul –Sales– has allowed salespeople to continue to do the same things, with the same processes, in the same way as they always have. If anything, what sales did do was increase its resistance to change. Sales leadership seems to have forgotten that doing the same things, in the same way, even in the face of major disruptions is unlikely to get a different result.

The main reason for this lack of change on the sales front is a lack of exposure or understanding of sales strategy. This has resulted in many sales leaders floundering – uncertain of what approach to take.

As a result marketing and corporate strategists became involved, taking the lead and, even though they had little understanding of the very specific focus of sales strategy, started driving the initiative. One of the worst manifestations of this was the erroneous impression that sales training was the solution to all sales problems.

TRYING TO FIX A SALES STRATEGY PROBLEM WITH THE WRONG THINGS

What these sales leaders and salespeople soon learned is that sales training alone didn’t encourage the changes needed to improve sales performance. Nor did increasing, expanding or contracting territories, etc. Nor did changing sales incentive plans or reward schemes. Nor did reorganising the salesforce.

The four most common approaches –sales training, incentives, territory planning and sales force restructures– taken by sales leaders to try to improve sales are not working.

The reason for these failures was not that the initiatives were wrong, but rather that they were driven more by panic, than by strategy. They were motivated by a need to try and get some incremental improvement in sales, rather than looking for a way to improve customer satisfaction, define and deliver real value to customers, and deliver more sustainable results.

Many sales leaders have failed to look at the bigger picture and the complex world in which they work. It is more common practice (and perhaps more comforting) to push for more sales productivity or to cut prices, than to step back and re-examine the entire sales strategy and sales processes that underpin sales success.

The message is clear. If sales leaders fail to have a clear picture of what they want to achieve supported by a sound sales strategy and operations plan, plus the courage and conviction to make their strategy real through real world application, they are doomed to fail.

Which path will you choose?

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Strengthening vulnerable micro-enterprises through microinsurance: The Adie experience

File: 

 MiN_Adie MI experience_EN.pdf

 MiN_Etude de cas Adie_FR.pdf

Description: 

Because of the major role played by MSMEs in the global economy, the microinsurance sector is gradually starting to recognise their importance and put them at the forefront of financial inclusion efforts. Microinsurance addresses the needs of MSMEs by transferring risk to a third party.

WHO IS THE ENTREPRENEUR?

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing else
- Helen Keller

It is the entrepreneur’s world now. Small entrepreneurs (both full-time and part-time) in large numbers have the potential to change the economic dynamics of any nation.

The dictionary defines an entrepreneur as “one who organizes, operates and assumes the risk for a business venture.” The true entrepreneur is one who embarks on a business venture knowing that he may end up poorer than when he started! Hmm, that’s risky, but therein lies the thrill and the lure for the entrepreneur.