Recently, I organized a mid-to-senior management review of 2019 HR work, which gave me much to reflect on. Personnel, especially talent, attrition can cause significant losses to a company, and losing talent to competitors doubles the damage. A qualified operator focuses on two things: personnel and finance.
In my view, personnel work is even more important than finance; it can be understood as: with 'people' (talent) there are 'things' (tasks), and with 'things' there is 'market' (market share).
Today, I'll share how to view team management from an HR perspective. Only when a regional manager manages their own team in an orderly manner can they have the right to help dealer teams.
-01- First, let's look at the six major modules of human resources.
1. HR Planning: This involves formulating measures to ensure the team stably possesses a certain quality and necessary quantity of manpower to achieve organizational goals, including individual interests, thereby matching personnel demand and supply in the company's future development.
2. Employee Recruitment and Placement: According to the team's business strategy, recruit excellent and suitable people into the company, and place the right people in the right positions.
3. Performance Appraisal: Internally, it evaluates people and their work status, reflecting their relative value or contribution to the organization through evaluation of work results. Externally, it involves purposeful, organized observation, recording, analysis, and evaluation of people in daily work.
4. Training and Development: The organization improves employees' work abilities, knowledge levels, and potential through learning and coaching, maximizing the match between personal qualities and job requirements, thereby promoting improvement in current and future work performance.
5. Compensation Definition: It refers to the total of various monetary and in-kind rewards employees receive for providing labor to the company.
6. Labor Relations: The socio-economic relationship established between workers and employers (including various enterprises, individual businesses, public institutions, etc.) during the labor process.
A qualified regional manager must possess basic HR skills and be clear on the above six modules to ensure they can operate a team normally. While ensuring the team operates efficiently, they should also help dealers manage their own teams.
-02- Next, understand the problems, internal cause analysis, and corrective plans from this year's HR review.
I. Symptoms: The company has invested significantly in human resources, but the following drawbacks still appear:
- Team building activities are few and monotonous, mostly dinners, wasting team building funds.
- Managers lack management art and skills; they give more orders than guidance, more criticism than encouragement, and even exhibit simple and crude management, leading to high turnover and stagnant staffing, especially severe during peak seasons.
- Lack of smooth communication channels; hierarchical communication is poor, problems are not discovered timely, and third-party departments (HR, marketing, etc.) have few visits and lack depth, failing to help identify potential issues from the side.
- Marketing units have not established role models at different levels; the exemplary effect is not obvious.
- Training is frequent, but evaluation of training effectiveness is severely lacking, leading to declining training quality.
- Assessment relevance is poor, lacking a main line; team members are imbalanced in quality, and high rewards coincide with team instability.
II. To correct internal causes, we need to view the following issues from the root:
1. Classification of reasons for team departures. A. Dismissed for insubordination or serious violations during employment. B. Family or personal reasons: marriage, childbirth, illness, or physical condition unsuitable for the job, making it impossible to fully commit to work, forcing resignation. C. Personal development elsewhere: job hopping, civil service exams, entering public institutions. D. Incompetence: abilities cannot meet job requirements, unable to withstand current job pressure, voluntarily resigning. E. Lax oversight, insufficient care, and inadequate or untimely help when facing market difficulties. F. Inability to accept superiors' management style or company assessment system. G. Income not meeting expectations.
Summary: Pay special attention to team stability during peak seasons; departures during peak seasons cause dramatic losses. Each departure reason may hide common issues; fully explore and avoid them timely.
2. Problems encountered in recruitment, retention, team building analysis, and corrective plans. A. Applicants can be divided into four types: 1. good attitude, good skills; 2. good attitude, poor skills; 3. poor attitude, good skills; 4. poor attitude, poor skills. Prioritize the first two; type 2 offers relatively more selection space. B. Managers selecting and leading teams cannot rely on 'taking things as they are' (i.e., not adapting to the team). C. In recruitment, deeply understand applicants, clearly describe the actual work situation, work model, income levels, etc., fully explore potential to match positions, and ideally obtain personal credit records of grassroots staff (especially emphasize this; currently, online loans are easy, and an employee with debt is prone to problems). D. Key to retention: income meets basic survival needs; encouragement is more important than criticism; rewards outweigh punishments; standardized management, care, and attention from start to finish; based on personality, focus on encouragement; establish a training team, refine work, provide hands-on help, and 'escort them after mounting the horse' (i.e., continue support). E. Team building: satisfy the love of play; collective activities are more important than bonuses; company atmosphere and culture.
3. Performance analysis, monthly/quarterly sales policy review, matching personnel incentive review, and corrective plans. A. Performance pay is a crucial part of compensation. With total costs unchanged, balance market investment and human investment. More market investment reduces market operation difficulty and employee passion; more human investment increases difficulty and passion. Finding the right balance is crucial. B. Performance assessment cannot be one-size-fits-all; give special care to new colleagues, possibly 'extra tutoring'. C. Performance assessment should be diversified, fair, practical, and aligned with reality. D. The ultimate goal of performance: laggards catch up, and top performers continuously break through.
4. Team training and corrective plans: combine internal and external training. A. Internal training should be anytime, anywhere; daily morning meetings, weekly meetings, and monthly meetings are the best training opportunities. Internal training is like the staple food on the table; it must be filling. Practical, easily replicable, common, convincing, and real cases from the team are the best internal training materials. Skills and attitudes are the two main themes. B. External training: invite or participate in courses from well-known institutions or teachers, for two reasons: improve work skills and enhance team pride.
5. Salary standard setting and corrective plans: Fixed portion should not be less than 60%. Where the assessment is, employees' work direction follows. Simple and clear assessment pay is the first element; complex assessment structures reduce employee attention. Comprehensive income should not be below industry average.
Summary: Through surface and internal cause analysis, we can clearly see common problems in team management. In practice, technical issues can be addressed one by one, and with accumulated experience, solving them is not difficult. So what are the macro-directional issues in team management? How to solve them?
-03- Next, watch a video about China's birth rate.
From this video, we can learn:
- Current population distribution in China: post-80s 219 million, post-90s 188 million, post-00s 147 million.
- China is richer than ever, but everyone feels they can't afford to raise children.
Conclusions:
- Main consumers are decreasing, consumer structure is changing, and market competition is increasing.
- Labor output is decreasing, management difficulty is increasing, and management models are constantly facing new challenges.
- Post-90s are gradually becoming the main workforce; raised with resources from two generations, their individuality is increasingly prominent.
Now look at a picture from the internet about attitudes toward resignation across different generations.
Conclusions: The living environment, education environment, and social environment of the workforce are all changing, and management models must adapt and update accordingly.
-04- In summary, viewing team management from four dimensions—HR, current team operations, internal cause analysis, and changes in population structure and living environment—leads to one conclusion:
The core philosophy of team management is only 12 characters: Follow human nature, respect personality, and improve human efficiency.
1. Follow human nature: Human nature is to avoid harm and seek benefit. A well-known beverage company encourages a 'white plus black' and '6+1' work model (day and night, 6 days a week plus Sunday), which violates human nature. Long-term indoctrination will reduce team stability and is detrimental to management. The core of following human nature is not to breach the bottom line of psychological and physiological needs. This aligns with organizational structure, recruitment, and labor relations.
2. Respect personality: Personality, also called individuality, originates from the Greek word 'Persona', originally referring to masks worn by actors on stage, similar to Peking Opera masks. Later, psychology borrowed this term to explain that on the stage of life, people change masks according to social roles; these masks are the external expression of personality.
Behind the mask, there is a real self, which may be completely different from the external mask. Personality mainly refers to the unique and stable way of thinking and behavior that distinguishes one person from another. For post-90s, individual differences are increasing; respecting personality is the premise of team management.
3. Improve human efficiency: As the name implies, human efficiency is the efficiency of people. Only by improving human efficiency can we increase output, reduce losses, and create profits. This aligns with performance assessment, training, and compensation setting.
Final Thoughts:
We often hear dealers say: the larger the scale, the less profit; the stronger the brand, the less profit; the more emphasis on culture, care, and corporatization, the less profit.
Actually, this is not necessarily true. Profit comes from increasing revenue and reducing costs. The waste of human resources due to poor team management is invisible but huge. In the new situation, dealers need to innovate and move forward; the most fundamental is to improve internal management and reshape a team with comparative competitive advantages.
Through various methods, motivate employees to actively expand networks, do well in core terminal displays, timely digest near-expiry products, etc., to enhance their own strength and cope with fierce competition. In this process, brand owners need to provide support from a macro perspective. Team management is people-oriented. May all managers strive to: follow human nature, respect personality, and improve human efficiency.
Extended Reading:
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