A recent Accountemps survey reports that managers spend, on average, 18 percent of their time—more than seven hours a week or nine weeks per year—intervening in employee disputes. When you are constantly dealing with employee issues, how can you move your business forward?
One key step is to hire the right employees to begin with. In this issue of Promotional Consultant Today, we share these five strategies from business author and speaker Mike Campion on how to find and keep the right employees.
1. Build a community, not a workforce. Campion says to encourage potential employees to join a community, not simply take on a new job. When you create a community of people with shared values who care about each other, the tendency to come in late, complain, whine or partake in other bad behavior decreases exponentially. When you build an appealing community with core values and characteristics, people want to be a part of that community.
2. Provide a sense of purpose. Once you build a community, your team will have a sense of belonging. Supercharge that with a sense of purpose and your organization becomes very appealing to top talent. People desperately want to be a part of something bigger than themselves—something they believe in.
Another way to create a sense of purpose in your organization is to adopt a cause. Become active in your community, give to a charity and do something as a team that creates value and gives everyone a reason to bound out of bed and be excited to get to work day-in and day-out. If you aren’t careful, you just might find yourself addicted to making the world a better place.
3. Offer experiences over expenses. A study by Harris Group found that 72 percent of Millennials prefer to spend more money on experiences than on material things. Shared experiences build bonds, families, communities and companies, but often you have to create the experience—the experiences don’t just happen. Consider having monthly events and do something fun. Invite employees’ families, customers, prospects, prospective employees, even vendors. All of this creates an environment your team is proud to be a part of and makes it very difficult for them to leave.
4. Show appreciation. Once you have built a community that the members are proud to be a part of by working towards a worthy goal and with experiences that bond everyone together, your employees will crave recognition from you and the community. When you have events, give awards—lots of awards. Not just the typical performance-based awards—awards for everything. Small things like this make big differences in employees’ lives and in their contribution to your organization.
5. Put a bow on it with core values. Core values are your secret sauce to attracting top-level talent without breaking the bank. Three to four key beliefs summed up in a word or two each become the guiding principles that provide your company’s special brand of awesome. Shared core values are the rules your company lives by to accomplish that community. Core values are the final secret that brings the first four all together and gives them power.
Source: Mike Campion is a celebrated speaker, entrepreneur and author of I’m a Freaking Genius, Why Is This Business So Hard? A small business expert, Campion has built several multimillion-dollar businesses, the most recent achieving $4.3 million in sales in the first 18 months. As the host of the Conversations with a Genius podcast, Campion imparts his business wisdom on his listeners.