How Do You Know if Your Business Is a Great Place To Work?
/Is your business a great place to work?
Before you answer that question, consider this: If you were to spend a day in your employees’ shoes, what do you think they’d say? If you’re not sure, it might be time to put some more thought into it.
Read on to learn why it’s important to offer a great work environment and a few ways to help you determine how your business is seen by employees and job candidates.
Why Is It Important To Offer a Great Place To Work?
When you create an organizational culture and workplace that your employees love being a part of, it doesn’t just benefit your employees. For one thing, if your employees enjoy their jobs, you’ll have less employee turnover and an easier time recruiting when you do need to hire.
Plus, a supportive work environment improves your team’s health and well-being, and happy employees are more engaged and productive.
Companies with healthy organizational culture have 72 percent higher engagement than those that don’t. When employees are engaged, they are more passionate about, motivated by, and connected to their work and the company as a whole. And businesses with an engaged workforce enjoy, on average, a 22 percent increase in profitability.
Simply put, providing a healthy work environment benefits your bottom line.
Different companies are great places to work for different reasons, so there isn’t a one-size-fits-all checklist to follow. But there are a few general things that business owners and leadership can look at as they evaluate how their company stacks up.
Check In With Employees Regularly
First of all, the best way to know how your employees view your organization is to ask them. Regular check-ins and reviews can give you a wealth of information about your workplace culture.
Employee Reviews
A good employee review includes gathering employee feedback on elements like management, compensation, benefits, and other factors that are important to your staff. We recommend doing employee reviews on a regular basis, including:
A formal check-in for new hires. Two to three months into their employment, meet with new hires for a thorough onboarding. This formal check-in is important, as it gives you and the new employee a chance to course correct if needed, or to simply know you’re off to a strong start.
In this initial review, cover topics like: how the position aligns with expectations, whether the new employee has the equipment and training they need to do their job, and whether they need assistance connecting with the team.
Then, do another check-in at six months and one year.
After the first year, the review schedule can vary depending on whether you want to tie compensation to the review.
Some of our clients do two reviews each year: a performance review and a separate salary review. In this case, the performance review offers a chance to look at how things are going, how to improve where needed, and how to help the employee move ahead in their career with the company.
Stay Interviews
A “stay interview” is a strategy to help retain your most valued employees.
It’s a chance to tell the employee how valuable they are and make sure they have what they need to be successful and happy in their career. A stay interview gives the employee a chance to tell you what their career goals are and gives you the opportunity to discuss how you can help them reach those goals. Then, you can put a plan together to make that happen.
This is a great opportunity to get feedback from your best employees on what’s working, what’s not, and what could drive them to leave. A stay interview allows you to address important conversations preemptively, giving both parties assurance moving forward.
Exit Interviews
When employees do leave, exit interviews can be highly valuable. In fact, if you’re experiencing high turnover, this is the best way to figure out what’s going on.
If you have experienced a spike in turnover, employees are often leaving for similar reasons. When we conduct exit interviews, we find that the themes that prompt people to leave are varied. The reasons someone leaves typically include difficulty with a manager or management, hours or flexibility, safety issues, compensation, opportunity for advancement, and benefit costs.
There’s one caveat with exit interviews:
To get real value out of them, you HAVE to be willing to listen to what exiting employees are saying and make adjustments accordingly. If you’re not willing to make changes, you’ll keep losing employees.
We have also found that former employees are a great resource for exit interviews and information. A number of our exit interview projects have involved connecting with past employees, and we find that with the passage of time, these conversations are often more insightful than conversations with recently departed employees.
Examine Whether Your Company Values Resonate With Your Employees
Another way to evaluate if your company is a great place to work is to determine how your company values are held and lived out by your employees. Can you think of examples of how your company values play out in your business on a day-to-day basis?
If not, that’s a problem!
Putting thought and energy into ensuring that your company values resonate with your employees helps build a strong work environment. A sense of camaraderie that exists in a great workplace is often related to the employees having a common vision.
Consider highlighting your company’s values at employee meetings or recognizing employees in your newsletter who have demonstrated a value in action. Ask your employees how they have seen the company’s values demonstrated throughout your company and share those examples in interviews and with other team members.
A company that has clear values and can point to examples of how they’re lived out within the organization is often perceived as a better place to work than one that doesn’t.
Look at Your Pay, Benefits, and Job Structures—Do They Match Up With Industry Standards?
For a job candidate, salary is an important part of determining if a job is a potential fit. More than ever, it’s important to make sure the pay you’re offering fits the industry average.
In addition to pay, it’s also critical to understand what employees are looking for.
For many employees, health insurance, a 401K with a match, and paid vacation are the top benefits sought when changing jobs. Depending on your industry, flexibility and remote or hybrid work options are also top requests of today’s job seekers.
We find that one of the key reasons currently employed candidates are interested in a new position is to advance to the next level in their career. Employees want to take the next step in their career trajectory with a new job (or within their current job). This means you need to understand what employees and job candidates are looking for in terms of career progression.
It’s important for both recruiting and retention to understand the relationship between job titles and years of experience, and to understand what your industry’s norms are in this regard. For example, if you are hiring a staff accountant, make sure that the years of experience you seek line up with industry standards for that position.
Learn More With Red Seat
We hope this blog inspires you to take stock and consider whether or not your company is a great place to work, and then take the necessary steps to improve.
To learn more about building a better work environment and how to recruit and retain top talent for your organization, take a look at these recent articles on our blog:
