Hiring and Retaining Based on Your Company Culture
90% of employers told Robert Half that, when it comes to hiring a new employee, fit with the company culture was more important than skills or resume qualifications. Yet most contractors haven’t taken the time or effort to really pin down precisely what their culture is.
Tune in this week as Wayne defines culture and discusses why it’s so important as it relates to both hiring and retaining top employees.
Please give us the benefit of your thinking in the comments section below. And don’t forget to contact Charlotte Kopp [email protected] about our next Contractor Business Boot Camp class. Seats are filling fast!
Hello. This is Wayne Rivers at The Family Business Institute. Thanks for tuning in. As always, we welcome your comments
and I'm going to ask for some specific comments at the end, and as always, click on our social media icons. Thank you.
This week I want to talk about hiring and retaining people by focusing on culture. Why is this important? Why does Wayne
flog us over the head with all this talk about culture? Well, guess what? I mean, this is no surprise. Employees who buy
into your culture and employees who thrive, this is from a Robert Half Report, by the way, employees who "thrive in
workplace environments are more productive and more loyal." I mean, is that not what we all want as employers,
productive and loyal employees? Golly, it makes perfect sense. So, people that are engaged in your culture, people that
can subscribe to your culture and embrace it in their hearts are just going to be better employees over the long-term.
So, again, a Robert Half Report. It's on their website. Robert Half is a big, I think, international employment agency. They
had a couple of terrific statistics in the report. And the first one is that 35% to 40% of potential employers said they
wouldn't accept a perfect job. More than a third. So, they wouldn't accept a perfect job if they didn't feel like it was a good
cultural fit. And then, beyond that, 90% to 91% of employers, that's a pretty close range, 90% to 91% of employers said
that fit with their culture is greater than or equal to the skills that people possess, resume, all those kinds of things. So,
employers see it, employees see it, you see it in your own organization, even if you're not quite willing to admit it yet. It's
just true. People that fit with your culture are better for you, you're better for them. It just works out. It's totally win-win.
So, let me define culture again, and this is from my peer group member, Steve Anderson, who wrote, The Wonderful Book
About Culture, we refer to in at least two other blogs. But he says that "your culture is the combination of beliefs, values,
attitudes, and resulting behaviors in an organization. It manifests itself in people's behaviors and communications."
Ultimately, the way he defines it in a simpler mode is it's how we treat each other in our shared journey in our company.
How we treat each other, that's your culture. Robert Half Reports that employee concerns are they want a collaborative
work environment, they want work-life balance. We've talked about that many times before. They want a flat structure
in participation. And that goes really well with other blogs we've done in years past that talk about how people want a
clear role and responsibilities. They want organizational transparency and they want to see that you care about work-life
balance. So, I think the Robert Half stats and the other stats that we've quoted in the past from McKinsey are pretty
consistent with each other.
Where do potential job candidates go first? They go to your websites. And I see all of your websites, all of our peer group
members, all of our prospective peer group members, all of our perspective clients all around the country, U.S. and
Canada. I go first to their websites, and some of them are amazing and rather breathtaking, but a lot of them, they're
websites from five, maybe 10 years ago. They could use some work. That's where your potential customers, your potential
vendors, your potential subs, and your potential employees go to learn about your company, and if your website doesn't
put your best foot forward, I think you should probably devote some time and attention to that. So, there's a quick exercise
in the Robert Half Report, and let me get you thinking about this now.
So, we've defined culture. These are questions that employment candidates might ask you about your culture. So, I'm
going to give these to you because you need to be able to answer them. I mentioned in a blog a few weeks ago, how a job
candidate asked me what was my leadership style? And I almost fell out of my chair because I did not have an answer.
Well, now we do. And I think you should be able to answer these questions too. So, first, how would you describe your
company's culture? It's not going to do to be off the cuff and get just shooting and grasping at straws. You need to have
your culture defined, as we talked about in a previous blog, so that you can deliver that concisely to the candidate. How
long have you been with the company? Why have you stayed as long as you have?
If you're doing, as we've recommended, group interviews where not only the employer interviews candidates, but as many
people in the organization as you can spare to do that. That's a great question for a candidate to ask. If I'm talking to
someone who's in an administrative position in the company, for example. It's not my potential CEO boss, but it's
somebody I'm going to be working alongside. I want to know why he or she has stayed there as long as they have and
what they identify within the culture. If you hear it from the CEO, there's an element of that that's a sales job. When you're
talking to somebody that you're going to be working with laterally, you might get a little more of a comfortable and a
straightforward answer.
What's the one thing that you wish you'd known before you started working here? That's a good one. How does the
company show that it's interested in helping people build careers? All great questions, all questions that you should be
able to answer about your company culture. As you do a sales job on the new candidate and the new candidate is doing
a sales job on you, you need to be able to have these heartfelt communications. Now, we're going to do a future blog,
also from the Robert Half Report, talking about the importance of onboarding. The first few days and weeks of a new
employee's tenure need to be special. They need to be welcomed into your organization the way you would welcome sonin-law or daughter-in-law and to your family. It really needs to be that intimate and that special, because when people
leave companies, they tend to do it early on in their tenure within the first six months or one year.
So, we'll talk about onboarding in a future video. I'd like to know what you guys are doing to invest in your culture. What
things have you done in the last one, two, three years that have made a difference in defining your culture, living your
culture, and attracting people into your culture. And finally, my last shaking my finger at you, if you're not investing time,
energy, and money in understanding your culture and building your culture, be advised that's a mistake because new
people that you're looking for in the marketplace are supremely interested in a company's culture.
This is Wayne Rivers at The Family Business Institute. Thank you.
