What does it take to be a Top Employer?

by Phillip Wright, Hay Group UK

Any organisation would love to be flooded with applications from high calibre job seekers. Any employee would like to work with highly motivated and engaged colleagues in a workforce that is dedicated to excellent customer service and quality products and services. Equally, the bottom-line benefits of having your best people highly productive and happy to stay and with only those employees that you would be happy to see moving elsewhere are obvious.

In short, how do you become and stay an “Employer of Choice”?

It is a field on which any company can compete. According to our research, large companies are no better than small ones in creating a positive work environment. No specific industry helps a company become an “Employer of Choice”, or indeed holds it back. Even avoiding redundancies is not a prerequisite for selection but, rather when faced with such a situation, ‘employers of choice’ are praised for providing fair severance packages and for treating out-placed employees with dignity.

So what do employers of choice have in common? There is no ‘silver bullet’; no single policy or practice alone assures success as an employer of choice. However, seven themes emerge from the top rated organisations:

  • They provide employees with a clear sense of direction: where the company is going and how individuals contribute to the overall goals of the organisation.
  • They “walk the talk”. It is vitally important to Employers of Choice to create and sustain a company culture that places a high priority on customer responsiveness, product and service quality and teamwork. Employees want a sense of pride in their organisation, whether this is provided through the success of the organisation, its focus on teamwork, or its commitment to community service/social responsibility, and they want to see their senior people leading by example and providing role-model behaviour of the organisations culture and values;
  • Because these organisations view employees as crucial to their success, they are often highly selective in who they recruit, more often hiring for a prospective employee’s longer-term career potential and for their “fit” within the organisation’s culture;
  • They help employees succeed in their roles. A number of “enablers” help employees perform well. The absence of these, even with a capable workforce, can lead employees to feel that their organisation doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about what they need to succeed. These “enablers” vary from job to job but generally have to include job training, modern fit-for-purpose equipment, the availability of relevant information, sufficient job authority, teamwork and co-operation, and a safe and healthy physical working environment;
  • They provide equitable compensation and competitive, or better, benefits. Whilst some ‘best’ companies pay above the market, this is not always the case. However, many of the best employers supplement their basic compensation packages with culture-shaping rewards such as profit sharing, bonuses or incentives, and/or share awards for most or even all employees;
  • They have reduced status symbols which reinforce the barriers between staff.
  • They are distinctive places to work. There is often some aspect of their culture – an organisational practice or company benefit – that is seen as “special” by their employees and which differentiates their organisation from the others.

While few companies excel in all of these areas, Employers of Choice excel in one or more, are at least moderately effective in each and, importantly, do not have any fatal flaws.

Becoming a great place to work does not happen overnight and cannot be achieved in good times only to be ignored when times get hard. In fact, it is when times get tough that the real character of an organisation comes out. Many of the top ranked organisations have a long tradition of being a good employer and are diligent in their efforts to retain this status. Certainly, an Employer of Choice will never take that accolade for granted.

Although challenging to achieve, becoming an “Employer of Choice” is a worthwhile objective. What matters to employees and potential employees is how an organisation tangibly demonstrates the value that it places on its employees and not what it might say in its Mission Statement. The combination of lower attrition-related costs and higher productivity from a workforce willing “to go the extra mile” will make a noticeable difference to the bottom line. Few organisations are perfect, and painful choices must sometimes be made, but what does it say to a workforce if their employer doesn’t even try to create a good environment?

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