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Improving Your Employee’s Hard Skills to Better Your Business

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Kanban Board: Workforce Planning (Excel workbook). A Kanban Board is a Lean & Agile Project Management tool used to implement Kanban to manage work at a personal or organizational level. Kanban Boards visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. [read more]

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As someone in a management position, you’re likely constantly looking to improve the performance of your employees. The better that your employees are able to perform, the better your business will perform.

This being the case, it can be useful to be aware of some important hard skills that can help your employees become more productive, efficient, and effective in their roles. Here’s how to improve your employee’s hard skills to better your business.

Understanding Which Skills to Promote

In order to effectively help your employees improve, you should understand which hard skills are the most valuable in a business setting. By understanding which hard skills these are, you can help your employees develop the skills that they need to improve your business as a whole.

Here are some hard skills that should be on your radar as a manager or business owner.

Computer Skills

In today’s digital world, being proficient with computer processes is a necessity. Unfortunately, those who entered the workforce before a certain time may not be as familiar with all of the processes of computers. As such, you need to ensure that all of your employees are proficient with computers and various software and applications that your business uses.

As someone in a management position, you can help your employees develop computer skills in a number of ways. You can set up workshops or even pair some less proficient employees with other computer experts in the office. However, you decide to go about it, it’s important that you ensure that all of your employees are able to use a computer effectively and with ease. Once this is the case, everyone will be able to help you in your mission to better your business.

Finance Skills

In nearly every field, having a strong command of finance skills can be useful. Though this is the case, developing finance skills doesn’t always happen for all employees. As such, it’s important that you make an effort to make sure that all of your employees have an understanding of basic financial principles and how they apply to your business. With an in-depth understanding of the financial side of your business, employees will be better informed and capable of making decisions that benefit your business.

There are many aspects to having finance skills including an understanding of accounting, analysis, and the technology that is commonly used to do these things in today’s constantly evolving world. Making sure that all of your employees have a rough understanding of these aspects of financial know-how can help you ensure that all of your employees have the skills to look at your business holistically and, in turn, help better your business.

Management Skills

Within any type of business, it’s imperative that every employee is well versed in management skills — even if they’re not in a management position. This is because managing relationships with others can have a significant impact on your business’s ability to function smoothly and thrive. This being the case, it’s important that each one of your employees is able to manage relationships with others both inside and outside of your company.

Management skills can also be important when it comes to corporate governance and managing competing interests within your company. In these situations, those with great management skills will be able to ensure that all disagreements are amicable, and all competing interests feel represented within your company.

For this reason, ensuring that your employees have great management skills can help your business thrive and improve in various ways.

Writing

While most employees at most companies will have a basic ability to write, many may have trouble writing clearly and succinctly. When it comes to having to communicate in business, being able to clearly communicate your ideas in writing is extremely important. As such, you can improve your business dramatically by simply ensuring that all of your employees can clearly communicate their ideas in writing.

In some cases, you may already have an idea of which of your employees have a good command of writing and which don’t. If this isn’t the case for you, you can simply do an exercise that is designed to test your employee’s abilities to write well and with clarity.

For those who don’t display great writing skills, it can be helpful to assign them some reading, assignments, or even require them to take some writing courses. Once each and every one of your employees is able to write well, your business will be in a great place to grow, find success, and thrive.

Helping Your Employees Grow

While many business owners and managers aren’t always concerned with their employees’ hard skills, making the effort to improve these skills can help put your business in a position to grow and thrive.

When all of your employees have a good command of some key hard skills, your organization will have a more solid foundation upon which to find more success. This being the case, you can benefit substantially from helping your employees develop and master some key hard skills that can make growing your business easier and more accessible.

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The purpose of Human Resources (HR) is to ensure our organization achieves success through our people. Without the right people in place—at all levels of the organization—we will never be able to execute our Strategy effectively.

This begs the question: Does your organization view HR as a support function or a strategic one? Research shows leading organizations leverage HR as a strategic function, one that both supports and drives the organization's Strategy. In fact, having strong HRM capabilities is a source of Competitive Advantage.

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About Shane Avron

Shane Avron is a freelance writer, specializing in business, general management, enterprise software, and digital technologies. In addition to Flevy, Shane's articles have appeared in Huffington Post, Forbes Magazine, among other business journals.




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