70% of employees would leave their current company to accept an offer with a new business known for investing in employee development and training.
At a time when many pharma companies are struggling to find and retain the right talent, it’s never been more important to work on developing your staff. However, it’s important to remember that while everyone in your team deserves development support, your organisation has different types of employees.
The methods you use to develop your star pharma team members may differ from the steps you take to empower underperformers.
Here’s how you can take a holistic approach for both sides of the coin.
Developing Underperformers and Slower Team Members
A lagging employee in an industry as fast-paced as pharmaceuticals can be a serious source of frustration for many business leaders. However, slower team members often struggle to achieve their potential because they’re not getting the right guidance and training.
Here’s how you can turn an underperforming employee into a superstar.
1. Find the Root of the Problem
First, you’ll need to know what’s causing the performance issue for your employee. Set up a meeting, either in person or on video, where you can discuss the tasks your staff member has been struggling with recently.
If your employee has been having a hard time delivering results according to deadlines, you may need to work with them on improving their schedule management skills and helping them organise their time. Or you may discover you’re simply placing too much work in one employees’ schedule.
You may discover that the root of the problem is a gap in your employee’s knowledge, such as an incompatibility with the software or tool you started using. Finding the root of the problem will help you work with your employee to find a solution. Not only does this eliminate performance problems, but it can help to ensure retention too.
2. Redefine and Explain your Expectations
Around 50% of employees say they’re not sure what management expects of them. It’s difficult for your team members to keep up with your expectations if they don’t know what they are. With that in mind, it’s worth having regular meetings with your employees, where you can discuss their job descriptions and highlight how you’re going to measure their performance.
Every employee in your workforce should have a clear understanding of what they’re expected to accomplish on a daily basis. It helps to further cement your expectations within company culture by providing constant, in-depth feedback too.
When employees excel according to your expectations, deliver rewards and make sure the rest of the team are aware of what those team members are being commended for. When your staff members struggle or underperform, explain why they’re not living up to your expectations. Highlight how their work was sub-par, what they can do to improve, and how their behaviour impacts the rest of the team and company.
3. Constantly Communicate
Communication is the key to engaging your workforce and getting employees to feel more connected to the business. Disengagement in the pharma landscape often leads to problems with productivity and performance because teams don’t feel motivated to do their best.
Via regular communication, you can discover what motivates and drives your employees by working with them to set goals for their career and professional performance. Communication can help you deliver the feedback your teams need to thrive and collect insights from staff members about how they feel you could better support them in their roles.
Setting up a culture of constant communication will ensure lagging team members don’t fall further behind in their development because they don’t know what to do next or aren’t sure who they can approach about an issue.
Developing Your Star Performers
Managing star performers in the Pharma landscape can often seem like a breeze. When your team members constantly deliver results and exceed your targets, it’s easy to almost forget about them entirely. Unfortunately, this can lead to a drop in engagement, particularly in today’s remote-first world.
To develop your star performers:
1. Build Long-Term Plans Together
The number one thing any Pharma company wants when it comes to managing star performers is to ensure retention. In a skills-short market, keeping your employees around for as long as possible is crucial. Ensuring your star performers can see a future with your business can really help with this.
Sit down with your top Pharma staff on a regular basis and ask them what they like and dislike about their current job, what kind of career goals they’d like to achieve in the future, and where they see themselves in the next 5 to 10 years.
Building long-term plans with your employees will help them envision a more exciting future with your company and keep them working towards specific goals.
2. Invest in Team building
Building good relationships at work is often crucial to motivation and engagement levels. Working with your star performers to strengthen their relationships with your other staff members will make them more likely to stick with your Pharma company for the long term.
At the same time, you can implement strategies into your team-building efforts which allow star performers to develop their leadership skills while supporting your other staff. Mentorship and buddy programs, for instance, are a great way for top staff to share their skills with other team members while taking on new challenges at work.
Just make sure the mentorship opportunities you offer don’t overwhelm your employees by adding too much extra work to their to-do list.
What Next?
Managing and developing your employees starts with recruiting the right team members, to begin with. Working with the right professional recruitment team in the Pharma industry to find the correct employees from day one will prevent you from putting too much additional work into making sure your team can thrive.
Kinetic has been working with Pharma and medical devices companies for over 10 years, focusing within the UAE landscape. Contact us today at (+971 (0)4 442 0921) or over email!
Chris
How Kinetic Can Help
Kinetic sources professionals locally and internationally for leading multinational, regional and local Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices companies, including Consumer Healthcare organisations.
If you need help sourcing the best candidates for your pharmaceutical or medical device organisation who will help drive your business forward this year, contact us today.