Dealing with the “usual suspects”

Have you ever noticed that you spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with problems arising from a minority of employees? The same principle was discovered a hundred years ago by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who observed that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. He went on to apply the 80/20 principle to lots of fields such as land ownership and the distribution of income in a population. But It also applies to all kinds of activities in everyday life.

Coupled with the Pareto Principle is the cyclical nature of job demands. Most jobs of a professional, administrative and managerial nature have troughs and peaks of demand that often follow a weekly or monthly pattern. Understanding these patterns and the Pareto effects can help to resolve staffing and job design issues. Much can be achieved by introducing self-service into routine demands on HR departments.  Moving from a reactive to proactive approach to problem solving can also flatten the peaks and troughs, as well as reduce overall future workloads. Many problems arise in HR systems because users were not sufficiently involved in the design of the systems. People live with the quirks and weaknesses that exist instead of getting them removed. That is why keeping a centralised log of system problems is a good approach.

Pareto is never more evident than when a company has a widely scattered workforce of sales and service personnel – especially if they are in different countries. It is typical in such circumstances for HR resources to be stretched dealing with one-off problems, often because they are having to cope with foreign legislative requirements and tax systems. In fact, a high proportion of those joining FedEE do so because of the costs, delays and sheer hassle of dealing with staffing matters in foreign locations. Every day we solve legal matters within minutes that before took many hours waiting for lawyers to call back or Googling for inspiration.

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