Conversations with Architecture Firm Leaders: Human Capital Management Challenges - Nurturing & Strengthening Your Team
I'm having conversations about your business, about your biggest challenges, and there's some key areas I've been covering lately about Human Capital Management and dealing with your people. The challenges you have dealing with your people. The top concerns have to do with acquiring, maintaining and nurturing and strengthening your people.
Today I focus on Nurturing & Strengthening.
I find a lot of architects who just see an employee's value as the return on getting the projects done, what that employee's direct expense is, and the markup that you put on it to get the profit margin.
I was listening to Evelyn Lee's podcast, Practice Disrupted (Practice of Architecture), and her interview with Robert Yuen, the founder of monograph. He made a statement that kind of turned my head a little bit, which made me think about this topic, about Nurturing & Strengthening the people who do your projects.
He compared the time that we either use to bill or that we use to track our profitability by offsetting whatever our revenue is to products--essentially time is the architects’ product.
I think this was interesting, because unlike static products that other businesses have; widgets or canned food or bicycles, we can add value to that time outside of the regular marketplace demands. In other words, the market demand on bicycles can go up and down depending on what's going on in the world, but the architects’ time, and the value of the time of all the employees who are working for those architects, has a different kind of value, a value that can be changed intentionally by nurturing and strengthening, by building the experience, the knowledge, the skills of the people who are using that time to create your projects.
Think about that, if you can intentionally increase the value of your people--you increase the value of the time--you can actually get more revenue, more profit from adding that value, getting your people more experienced, getting them developed professionally, turning them into team leaders through training.
Every person is unique, so each person is going to have different capacities to take on that additional value. So you have to judge how each person will react to that, look at their strengths and determine how do you expand and develop that person? Is that person, somebody who is going to give you value. You really have to look beyond what they're doing right now to what their potential is, but you have to intentionally help them.
A lot of architects believe that career development is the employee's responsibility and that they get rewarded through the salary or the wages that you pay them, but the business actually can get a great advantage by increasing the value, increasing the revenue, increasing the profit margin through a higher level of developed employee.
The top four Human Resource Challenges are
Succession & Career Development Planning, 44% firms said that according to the Deltek’s survey,
Then Employee Engagement & Experience. That was 41%
Then Retaining Employees, 37% of firms said that that was a top challenge
Learning And Development Programs, 24% of firms said that that was a top challenge.
All of these can be enhanced by training, developing your staff. And you get the benefit of greater profitability with more revenue through their greater skills, by nurturing and strengthening them.
Deltek also reported that firms are reporting they are investing in Comprehensive Development Strategies. This is mostly bigger firms, but your competitors are doing this too.
So what can you do right now to be able to Nurture & Strengthen and build the value of your team? If you think that, because you're a small firm, you can't afford it, think about this. It's an investment, but it's a lot more affordable than you think. There are options out there that the return on investment is huge.
I have a video that I recorded that I'd like you to check out about how the value of increasing their skills and knowledge is worthwhile to your bottom line.
https://architectsacclerator.com/fillopeningsnow
Start with what you can afford. Architects’ FAST TRACK To LEADERSHIP System™ is a comprehensive leadership program to give certain staff members a full training and leadership to get them ready to take on projects. dealing with consultants, understanding clients, doing presentations, mastering entitlements, the Fast Track is a comprehensive combination of all that training. https://architectsaccelerator.com/fasttrack
