How to Become an Employer of Choice in 2021
The War for Top Talent rages. Although COVID has done a number on large segments of the economy, particularly retail, travel, hospitality, gaming, entertainment venues, and food service, other segments continue to thrive. These include: online retailing, advertising/marketing, agribusiness, law, accounting, finance, and a whole litany of service industries.
If you are responsible for prospecting and hiring top-tier talent for your organization, you know the market for skilled executives, technicians, and creatives remains as competitive as ever. And the only way to nab the A-level people you need is to be a place where imaginative, innovative, experienced, curious, ambitious, and highly skilled men and women want to work.
Money alone won’t solve your problem. How many times have you heard disgruntled employees say, “They don’t pay me enough to put up with this crap!” In times of trouble, even C-Suite executives will freely offer up this lamentation. For the fact is, no amount of money can compensate for a working environment offering only frustration, dehumanization, abuse, confusion, belittlement, anonymity, and/or soul-sucking boredom.
The key to attracting and retaining the best your industry has to offer is to create an organizational culture that is employee-centric. This idea of putting the employee first may sound counter-intuitive to those schooled in the dictum “The Customer is Always Right,” a phrase coined by American retailers in the early 20th century. That philosophy not only rightly promoted the valuable notion of “customer satisfaction”, an issue with which businesses have become virtually obsessed in this Age of the Internet, but also suggested workers should make any sacrifice and take any form of abuse if it meant closing a sale.
Yet as later studies revealed, happy employees are more apt to produce innovative products and deliver higher levels of service that, in turn, result in high customer satisfaction than are workers who are either always looking for better opportunities or who have become listless zombies. In the spirit of obtaining those happy workers, here are but a few ways companies can become more employee-centric:
Focus on employee well-being. This is a big new term, one supplanting the more common “employee wellness.” What’s the difference? Wellness programs tend to focus on physical health and are restricted to offering one-size-fits-all prescriptions covering diet, exercise, recreational alcohol and drug use, etc. Well-being, on the other hand, looks at the employee in toto, including everything from mental health, social activities, and even “financial health.” Wellness programs are focused primarily on minimizing sick days and lowering insurance costs; well-being initiatives are designed to make employees more engaged and productive. (Holistic “well-being” programs have become a number-one priority of business leaders looking to keep their companies competitive in the 21st century marketplace.)
Invest in paid employee volunteer programs. The idea of a “paid volunteer” sounds like an oxymoron, but many companies are paying employees to take time to support their favorite charities and support organizations. (This is different from bosses who “contribute” employees to support their own pet projects.) These paid volunteer programs allow employees to interact more with their local communities and establish stronger bonds between businesses and the customers they serve.
Allow for flexible schedules. The ongoing COVID pandemic has changed much about the way we live and work and has challenged many of our assumptions about what is and is not productive in a professional setting. One of these assumptions was to be successful, a business needed to operate on a rigid schedule, with employees spending a minimum of eight hours per day at their workstations. Now, with many people working from home to avoid coronavirus infections, companies have discovered that people can work odd hours and still be just as productive, if not more so. (Expect flexible schedules to become standard operating procedure at many organizations even after “herd immunity” is attained.)
Create a “compassionate environment.” A “compassionate environment” is one in which managers recognize workers have lives outside the workplace and that events like family illness, death, school functions, etc., may occasionally take priority and so projects and schedules may need to be worked around them.
Diversity & Inclusion. The push for “diversity” goes beyond just proactively hiring token “minorities” to fill slots in otherwise heterogeneous work forces. It connotes an openness to hearing many voices and views, regardless of race, ethnicity, sex, or social status when it comes to creating company policy and solving specific problems. After all, sometimes the most creative solutions come from the most unlikely of sources. (Which is why companies welcoming a diversity of opinions and input are often the most successful and profitable.)
My team and I have spent more than 25 years helping businesses of all types become companies of choice for A-Level job hunters. To learn more about how you can attract top talent to your organization by creating an employee-centric culture, please read about me in Forbes or contact me at laura@conoverconsulting.com.