Why Your Employee Experience Should be Part of Your Growth Strategy
As a result, some aspects of business development focused on the longer-term will get pushed down the priority list. For example, not many companies strategize their employee experience.
But this is a big mistake. Favorable work environments that allow people to build stimulating personal and professional lives are going to make your company’s success more durable.
Here’s why:
Attract Top Talent
The success of your company is going to depend on the people you hire to work for it. Talent acquisition is always one of the most challenging tasks for any company, but it’s even more difficult in today’s competitive labor market.
Taking time to plan your employee experience will help you create a highly-desirable work environment that people from all over will want to join. This is your employer brand, and you need to include in your growth strategy how you’re going to make this branding authentic.
Here’s a few things to think about.
Give the People What They Want
Remember that job seekers are essentially consumers, and your open positions are the products they’re looking to buy. Ask yourself what top talent wants, and then build this into your planning so that you can create a culture that will help lure people away from your competitors and towards you.
Salary is obviously important, but as millennials become the largest segment of the workforce, this is changing. To help you tailor positions to the demands of the labor market, you may want to consider outsourcing recruiting and other HR functions.
This way you can focus more on the internal aspects of enhancing employee experience and let professionals market this to your target audiences.
Retain Your Best
Attracting top talent is obviously critical to the future success of your company. But equally important is your ability to keep this talent around.
High turnover not only makes you less efficient, it also costs you a lot of money. As a result, it’s important you develop a workplace environment that people don’t want to leave.
Some characteristics of a highly-desirable working environment are:
- Professional development opportunities. If people don’t see the opportunity for upwards mobility, they they’re going to start looking elsewhere for work. Investing in eLearning platforms and tuition assistance gives your employees the chance to further their education and become better at what they do. Of course, you need to match this by providing people with the opportunities to put these newfound skills to work, but that can come later.
- Flexibility. Work-life balance is very important to today’s workforce. Offering people the chance to work remotely, or to set up a flexible schedule, is going to help them lead more balanced lives, which will give them a very large reason to stick around and keep working for your company.
In general, it’s hard to reduce turnover rates once they’ve gotten out of control, so it’s important to strategize ways to make sure this never happens.
Develop an Exciting Company Culture
Business leaders across the world agree that a strong company culture gives you a significant competitive edge. And job seekers these days are increasingly concerned with this aspect of a company, meaning efforts to improve employee experience must go hand in hand with the company’s cultural development.
This is significant because employee experience is essentially a product of your company culture. Culture is loosely defined as “the way things are done around here.” So if you’ve created a high-stress, results driven culture, then it’s going to be hard for you to deliver an employee experience focused on creating a good balance between work and life’s many different responsibilities.
Start working on this right from the beginning since it’s easier to create a quality employee experience reflective of the culture you’re trying to build when you’re team is small. This will provide a solid starting point for taking on the task of cultural development, also making it more manageable and more likely to produce results.
Start Planning Today
Success comes from good planning and execution.
When trying to grow a company, it’s normal to become overly-focused on growth, as this is what will ultimately keep you afloat. But make sure to pay attention to some longer-term issues, as doing so will help make this growth, and your company, more successful for longer.
About the Author: Jock works with business owners in the initial stages of founding a company, and he helps them plan their growth strategy all the way through to their exit. He is well-versed on what it takes to grow a business in today’s competitive marketplace and having the right talent is an absolute must. Find out more about Jock and his business on LinkedIn.