GROWING YOUR BUSINESS: Culture change will improve your hiring

by Dan Beaulieu
Business consultant

The tide has changed when it comes to employers and employees. Certainly, there is a shortage of the latter which is causing significant problems for all businesses, especially smaller ones. We are seeing restaurants both large and small including take out places, closed on Monday and Tuesday for lack of people to work those days and also to give their very hard working employees a break from the many hours they are putting on the days they do work.

It is much more difficult to get people to work at our houses. There is a shortage of everyone from landscapers to roofers to plumbers to electricians to just about every business you can think of.

This is an obvious problem, but it also reflects a more longstanding problem and that is one of the traditionally imbalanced relationship between the worker and the boss.

For years hard working people considered a job a privilege. They were proud and happy they had a job. But in the last few years not so much. It is now an employees’ market and will be for a number of years to come. This means that the employers have to change their ways and change their company cultures in favor of the employees.

One of the companies with a multi-million dollars electronics company recently hired 13 people…now a few weeks later two are left, all the others left in a matter of days once they saw that although the pay was good, the work was hard.

Now as a solution we have gone to work on that company’s culture. We are implementing a program that will change the culture of the company focusing more on the engagement of the employees by making them feel a sense of ownership in the company. Among the initiatives we are instituting are:

• Creating an orientation and training plan for every new employee teaching them about the company, and the industry, showing them a bigger picture than just their department.
• Showing them a future. Creating a career path for them that demonstrates when they can go in a year, five years towards making a good and financially profession in our field.
• Constant communications: Keeping all employees involved with the progress of the company by holding, among other things, monthly “all hands” meetings
• Offering small bonuses from introducing a potential employee to the company, paying them if that person is hired.
• Making the new employees, and all the employees for that matter, like they are important stake holders in the company and instituting profit sharing programs where, if the company does well, everyone will be rewarded.
• And finally, honestly caring about each and every one who works at the company, making sure that everyone feels they matter.

When all is said and done, people want to feel they matter, that their brain is as important as their hands, that their opinion is listened to and values as well.

No matter what size business you have from a factory with 200 people to a pizza shop with ten people, to a landscaping business with four people, applying these principles changing your company’s culture in this direction will go a long way towards solving your man and woman power issues. And yes, it’s a great way to grow your business.