As your company moves beyond the start up to a growth stage, it’s your employees who will have the most impact on the long-term performance of your business. In fact, in my experience businesses thrive because they’ve been able to recruit and retain talent who are able to move into leadership roles. Below are three strategies I advocate to make your company a place your top performers will never want to leave.
- Build a great company culture.
Strong company cultures that attract passionate and talented employees don’t arise out of thin air. They have to be strategically created, built from the top down and nurtured over time. Otherwise, your organisation’s culture will be a disorganised combination of competing ideas with no guiding philosophy behind them. When you know in detail what your company culture is, then you can recruit people who will be a good fit for it. This is vital since numerous studies show culture fit is a crucial component of employee retention.
- Set clear expectations and empower employees to exceed them.
The first big responsibility you have to your employees is to establish ambitious, yet feasible expectations for them. Hardworking, talented employees want to work with as part of a team to achieve great things, but they’re also wary of any company that doesn’t have defined milestones. If, in an interview, a business owner claims, “We’re in a rapid growth phase, and things are changing too fast to have specific goals for your position,” the applicant interprets this as, “I have no idea what they’ll hold me accountable for.”
Once you let your employees know exactly what will be expected of them, your second major task is to empower them to achieve those goals. Give them the tools they need to thrive in their role, whether it is technology, training or coaching.
- Highlight your company’s social impact.
The impactful workers of today are looking for much more than just a salary when they agree to take a job. They want to work for an organization that has defined values and routinely makes a difference in society. In fact, 58% of millennials say they would take a lower salary in order to work for a company that has similar values to their own, according to Net Impact’s latest Talent Report. Businesses increase their likelihood of retaining top talent when they support social causes their team members care about.
