What Membership Organizations Should Know about Workforce Flexibility: Advice for The Board.
Workforce Flexibility?
Workforce flexibility?is an economic concept that the boards of member-based organizations ought to be very familiar with.
This is because?most member-based organizations have highly inflexible workforces.?They require extremely specific knowledge and experience from their managers to perform even basic administrative tasks – exposing them to significant risk.
What happens to your renewal rate when a critical membership manager gets sick during renewal season?
How do you respond to a WordPress update that crashes your website, when the employee that built it years ago has since moved on?
How do you manage thousands of members when the spreadsheet used to manage them can only be understood by the now-retired manager who built it?
What kind of salary do you have to pay to attract and retain employees capable of managing the intricate network of spreadsheets, website tools, email campaigns, and financial software your organization depends on to survive?
If questions like these are cause for concern, you have an inflexible workforce. Fortunately, increasing workforce flexibility is not difficult, and comes with a range of benefits that go beyond reducing your exposure to risk!
How to Make Your Workforce Flexible
1. Understand What’s Making You Inflexible.
To solve the problem of workforce inflexibility, it’s important first to understand it:
Your spreadsheets, campaign managers, payment processing system, event planning tools, etc. each require a degree of skill to use. Each one you depend on adds to the complexity of work, and therefore level of skill you require from members of your workforce.
However, another level of skill is required to?use them together. Managing even a simple event requires a membership manager to conduct a complex orchestra of data-sharing between your spreadsheets, email campaign manager, event planning system, website, and financial software. This multiplies?the complexity of the work required to manage your organization, and in turn the risk faced by the possibility of losing even temporary access to your specialist employee(s).
2. Address Complexity.
Every tool required to manage your organization adds to the complexity of work. Manually sharing data between?those tools multiplies it.
Making work simple is therefore a matter of:
- Eliminating the need for managers to manually share data.
- Minimizing the number of different tools required to manage your organization.
These 2 points are a simple ideas, but executing them is a serious challenge. Fortunately,?it’s not a challenge you have to face.
The market has done so already!
The Market’s Solution
Membership-management?platforms like Member365 are the market’s response to the need of member-based organizations to reduce the complexity of their management processes.
Businesses like ours have done the work of analyzing the complexities of how member-managers work, developing tools to optimize and simplify these once-complex processes to protect you from the risks of of an workforce inflexibility!
Here’s a taste of how companies like Member365 do it:
Automated Data Sharing
Sharing data between different systems that manage your spreadsheets, events, email campaigns, finances, etc. takes work because each one has different data requirements. Your managers have to know what each one requires, and do the work of manually managing that data each time they share it from system-to-system.
Bring this data into a software environment like Member365 that performs this work?automatically,?and you can affect a massive on driving the simplicity of management. This not only eliminates much of the specialization required required to manage your members, making your workforce a flexible one, but?also reduces the time and energy required to perform nearly every management task, making work more efficient.
Tool Optimization
Email campaign managers like Mailchimp are designed to serve a wide range of industry verticals, of which membership-management is one. The same can be said of event management systems like Eventbrite, the spreadsheet manager you use to manage contact information, and nearly every other 3rd party tool you depend on to help manage your members.
These tools allow your organization to do the work of member-management.
Tools like Member365?empower your organization to do the work of member-management because our tools are designed for your work.?From contact record management, to email campaigns, events, and everything in between – you can depend on our tools to enable you to do the same work?faster?and?better because?they are designed only for you!
The Advantages of a Simple Management
Platforms like Member365 empower your workforce flexibility by making the management of your organization less complex. By simplifying management, Member365:
- Protects you from the risks associated with the loss of access to specialist employees through sickness, retirement, etc.
- Reduces the cost and time required to educate employees on management processes.
- Improves the efficiency of every management task, amplifying the productive potential of each of your employees.
To learn more about how platforms like Member365 can drive the interests of your organization, visit our blog next week as we talk about how our service protects your data, helps you appeal to shifting member demographics, keeps you GDPR compliant, and more!