A company considered an ’employer of choice’ has two primary qualifications: the ability to attract and retain top talent. When outlining your strategy to become an employer of choice; it is worth breaking it down into two categories.
Attract Top Talent
What attracts an employee to a specific company can vary, but typically it includes one or all the following:
- Company reputation
- Job description
- Pay
- Benefits
Take a critical look at each of the areas and perform a SWOT: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Include actions within your strategy that take all four areas of the SWOT into account when creating your action plan:
- Find ways to utilize your strengths more
- Put actions in place to improve a weakness so it does not cause harm
- Analyze the opportunities to see if they align with your current strengths
- Assess the risk of any threats and create actions if required
Retain Top Talent
While compensation may attract someone to a business, it typically does not make them stay. The reason for leaving may be the boss or the job. To retain top talent, you need to focus on your company culture.
• Understand your current state through completing a company engagement survey followed by some facilitated discussions that will allow you to get a well-rounded understanding of the results.
• Define your ideal culture by asking what do interactions between leaders and team members look like? What do customer and client interactions look like, and how are problems handled? Do employees receive and give feedback? Determine if employees achieving their goals by getting in-depth and very specific around this. Create a vision in your mind what day-to-day interactions will look like and find several ways to communicate this vision to leaders, employees, and other stakeholders.
• Create and implement your plan, then keep in mind that culture starts with the leaders, and if you want to make change, you need to start there. Even experienced leaders can benefit from a training course, particularly to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
Become an Employer of Choice
The important part with change is to start small. When creating your plan, start with some small changes that will be obvious, but not too scary. Be patient but persistent. Soon, the successes of the small changes will start to build momentum into larger actions and larger successes.
Click the link to learn more about our CORE engagement survey.