Attracting and Retaining Talent

Becoming an Employer of Choice

T. Baker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137411730
• eBook ISBN: 9781137411754
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Many companies are striving to adopt an'employer of choice' strategy in an attempt to attract and retain quality staff, although few do this well.This bookoffers a practical roadmap for developing a more productive workplace culture; one thatreflects the changing needs of the modern employee and the progressive organisation.

chapter 1

The Eight Changing
Values

Businesses that don’t embrace and promote these new values are likely to become less and less appealing places to work for good employees who value this new way of thinking.

I vividly recall training a group of professionals on the virtues of completing the ubiquitous “to-do list” many years ago. Sound familiar?

As I passionately proclaimed the merits of doing this simple but powerful task to my audience, I noticed their eyes becoming glazed. They were tuning out instead of tuning in.

I could see clearly from this that these leaders weren’t going to take my well-intentioned advice and make a to-do list.

Why? Why wouldn’t you do something so simple and effective? I thought.

Then it dawned on me … The power of what goes on outside the four walls of the training room has more influence than I or any other trainer could ever muster.

The workplace to which these leaders belonged had a “fly by the seat of your pants” culture. In other words, they weren’t convinced that being organized would work in their current organizational culture. It made me think, if I could change the culture of the workplace, I could change these leaders’ mindsets about a simple organizing tool like the to-do list and many other things.

I truly understood for the first time that sustainable change is about changing people’s thinking. But, if I could change people’s thinking, I could change their behavior.

If you are an employer or manager, imagine for a moment if you had a million prospective employees knocking at your door looking for a job every single year. Surveys show that most people dread going to work every day. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to work in an organization that is often more fun than being at home with your family. Are these two situations a pipe dream? No, it’s not a dream, it’s reality. Google, the iconic Californian-based search engine giant, is such a workplace. Consistently voted one of the best places to work in corporate America, Google receives 3,000 applications a day—which equates to one million applications a year—from people wanting a job. They are all chasing about 4,000 jobs. Employees who are lucky enough to work at Google claim that they often have more fun at work than at home. Yet Google is posting record profits. These remarkable features are no accident. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, believes that Google’s competitive advantage in the marketplace is not superior products and services: it is their workplace culture. Google is an employer of choice.

Attracting and Retaining Talent is for anyone who is interested in fundamentally changing the culture of their organization. It does not matter whether you are working in a public or private-sector organization, or a small, medium-sized or large enterprise. If you cannot keep your best performers and at the same time recruit other stars to work with you, you are in trouble, or soon will be. In the modern workplace, this is the most tangible way to be—and remain— competitive in a climate of accelerated change and uncertainty.

What is an employer of choice?

In plain terms, employer of choice means an organization that is a great place to work. If companies don’t genuinely act to become an employer of choice, then good employees will simply vote with their feet and move to a forward-thinking employer that offers them what they want. Being an employer of choice is more than a marketing gimmick.

An employer of choice is a flexible, customer-focused, performance-oriented organization, one that is more maneuverable and engages the hearts and minds of their people. This kind of workplace culture is characterized by great commitment from employees to achieve the organization’s vision. An employer of choice is continuously learning, developing, and improving. Employees are relentlessly encouraged to be enterprising and resourceful, and they respond to this challenge willingly and consistently.

An employer of choice is a flexible, customer-focused, performance-oriented organization

The opposite characteristics can be observed in the traditional organization, based on the “them and us” mindset. These places of work are rigid and inflexible, are more focused on themselves than the customer, lack exceptional performance, are set in their ways and practices; workers leave their brains “in a paper bag at the door” when they come to work. Instead of learning from their mistakes, employees cover up their mistakes: they stop learning. Employees are directed to follow systems and processes and taught not to question the way things are done. Unfortunately, there are still many organizations operating like this today.

From my research and observations in over a decade as an international consultant, I believe it boils down to the nature of the relationship between the boss and the worker. The “them and us” mentality is perpetuated by habit and tradition, some militant trade unions, and managers and employees who think this is the way it ought to be. Yet it is the backdrop for an inflexible and rigid workplace: one that has poor customer relations and that is more concerned about the start and finish time of workers each day than focusing on their real performance. Employees are disengaged and find their work meaningless. Companies of this ilk will not hesitate to reward a mediocre employee with a widescreen plasma TV for twenty years’ of service, but will chastise an energetic employee for showing initiative. Managers will sponsor training, but only if it directly affects the bottom line: personal development is non-existent and viewed as a waste of money. People who mindlessly follow systems are favored over others who want to do things their way. It is therefore not surprising that most people don’t want to work in this sort of place. This type of culture is entirely unsuitable for meeting the challenges of the modern marketplace. An organization with this traditional approach to the employment relationship is an employer of choice too. But the difference is that people actively make a choice not to work there—and those who do, do not have a choice. I recently read a great saying that sums up this predicament: the only rats that leave a sinking ship are the ones that can swim!

What does an employer of choice have to offer employees?

Employees are attracted to employers of choice for a variety of reasons. People are encouraged and supported to grow on the job, and develop a broader array of capabilities. For example, people are often given the opportunity to master a variety of skills, and this gives them more scope to apply for other jobs in other enterprises. But, ironically, they often choose to stay because of the attraction of this wide-ranging approach to developing people’s capacities. An employer of choice will most likely have good support structures in place for dealing with customers. These superior systems reduce stress and focus employees on their primary task: to provide effective solutions for customers. Employees are rewarded and recognized for high performance. Many organizational members respond well to these incentives and consequently lift their performance. Cross-functional communication is encouraged. Departments and divisions are not as important in these adaptable structures. Most people are fully engaged in their work and committed to achieving the goals of the enterprise. They are encouraged to think and act freely and not be constrained and dependent on the organization. Employees are well informed and have complete access to all the information they need for do their work. These benefits are appreciated by employees and attractive to prospective employees.

How many progressively-minded employees want to be locked into jobs with a restricted range of skills, mindlessly following internal systems and processes that fail to consistently address the immediate needs of the end user? Good employees want to be recognized and rewarded for exceptional performance rather than receiving pay parity, regardless of how they perform their work. They are not likely to want to work in a departmental structure with a silo mentality that separates them from the rest of the organization. Modern employees are generally happy to commit to achieving business goals, but don’t necessarily want to be subservient to a boss. People with the right attitude want to grow and develop from their work but not necessarily be dependent on the organization. It is natural for people to want to know what is going on and not be told on a “need to know” basis. Employees are quite capable and ready to express initiative in the right circumstances with the right information and encouragement. This old employment relationship mindset is increasingly less attractive to capable workers.

The roadmap to become an employer of choice is based on a new mindset supported by eight values. Collectively, these eight shared values are what I refer to as the New Employment Relationship Model. This set of values forms the basis for a new working relationship that is diametrically opposite to the old employment relationship. Each value of the new mindset is the reverse of the eight values that have defined the “them and us” relationship we have observed since the birth of industry. Although this traditional employment mindset has been unraveling for some time, old ways of thinking are still entrenched in the workplace.

What is the traditional employment mindset?

The traditional relationship between employee and employer has been in existence for over two hundred years since the Industrial Revolution. But this conventional relationship is under considerable strain. As the world of work evolves, employees and employers are increasingly unsure of what their role is in the relationship. This uncertainty is creating a lot of tension in contemporary workplaces that extends across all industries.

For example, employees with a traditional mindset about their role expect their boss to tell them what to do. Assuming, of course, that it is not an unreasonable demand, the traditional-thinking employee sees their role as one of complying with the boss’s requests. These employees find it hard to cope with a forward-thinking manager who expects them to think for themselves. In reverse, traditional-thinking managers expect employees to follow directions and not question their wisdom. They do not cope well with employees who show initiative and enterprise. So, enterprising employees will undoubtedly be frustrated by an autocratic boss. These situations of role confusion are commonplace and create anxiety and misunderstanding in today’s workplaces. But fifty years ago, employees and employers were clear about their roles. For instance, a manager who invites employees to think for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Eight Changing Values
• 2 The New World of Work
• 3 Does the HRD Industry Have a Future?
• 4 The New Employment Relationship Model
• 5 Learning and Earning: From specialist employment to flexible deployment
• 6 Customer-centricity: From internal focus to customer focus
• 7 The End of the Job: From job focus to performance focus
• 8 Burn the Organizational Chart! From functional-based to project-based work
• 9 Engaging Hearts and Minds: From human dispirit and work to human spirit and work
• 10 Committing to the Cause: From loyalty to commitment
• 11 Three-dimensional Learning: From training to learning and development
• 12 Overcoming the Initiative Paradox: From closed information to open information
• 13 The Corporate Culture Change Cycle: Case study
• Index