Employee engagement and retention has never been more challenging — not to mention attracting great people to your organization to begin with!
You’ve no doubt had the experience of a highly sought-after prospect choosing to decline a position and go to a competitor because they’ve heard the competitor has a better working environment, workplace culture, or more opportunities.
So how do you compete and pull top talent towards your organization? The answer lies in having a strong employer brand.
An employer brand is all about how your organization is viewed and perceived by potential hires and existing employees. This includes qualities like your reputation, leadership structure, workplace culture, branding, and many more.
All of these traits, for better or worse, culminate together to paint a picture of what it’s like to be an employee at your organization. This perception can be the make or break between a really high-quality employee choosing to work at your organization, or at a competitor.
To prove this point even further, a recent study showed that 75% of employees looking for a new job research an organization’s reputation and employer brand before applying.
Let’s take a look at 4 ways you can boost your employer brand so you can not only bring in the best people, but have a positive impact on employee retention to keep them for the long term.
1. Define and Establish Your Company Culture
Your workplace culture is the backbone on which everything is built.
Culture defines how your employees work, how they communicate, what organizational leadership looks like, and most importantly what you really stand for.
To build up a strong employer brand, your organization has to stand for something that motivates both your present and future employees. This means having a strong mission that’s backed by the actions of everyone from the top down.
When you align your organization on a mission, your people unite under a shared cause and begin to work and act in a way that is synonymous with that culture, especially if leaders in the organization are setting a strong example.
2. Foster Better Work-Life Harmony for Employees
Did you know that a recent survey done by Deloitte in 2022 found that the biggest reason a millennial or Gen Z stayed at their company was for good work-life balance?
It was the single most important factor with over 39% of millennials putting it as their top reason for staying at their current organization. That means if most of your workforce is millennials, almost half of them want better work-life harmony and have an expectation of wellness culture in the workplace.
If your organization becomes known for providing this to its employees effectively, it gives you a huge competitive advantage when looking at attracting and retaining top millennial talent.
One of the main reasons organizations are able to achieve better work-life harmony is through their leadership.
Effective leaders implement mentoring and coaching in the workplace, meeting with their teams to understand when they need to take more time to themselves so they can work on a creative project or why a certain employee may need to work from home for a week.
They know how to connect with and trust their team to do great work, and that goes a long way with millennials and Gen Z.
3. Have Clear Progression Paths for Employees
For employee engagement and retention to remain high, people need to know how they can reach their goals in the working world—and it’s the responsibility of every organization to make those clear and authentic.
If you’re desiring to bring in the top talent from around the world, they’re going to want to understand how they can eventually move into a higher position and what their path to that position looks like. If your organization is unable to provide that to them, they will most likely look elsewhere.
People leaders who are trained with mentoring and coaching skills are able to have conversations to better understand what a talented employee’s goals are within the company and work with them to come up with an action plan for reaching those goals.
4. Practice Coach-Like Leadership
Coach-Like Leadership is what brings the employer brand alive. Coach-Like Leaders understand the role of culture in the workplace.
They are focussed on building a culture of trust, are champions of creating wellness culture in the workplace, understand what flexibility means to others, and consistently support team members to set meaningful goals for their progression.
If your leaders are more coach-like, more people will want to work with them and stay for the long term, making your employee engagement and retention easier than ever.
If your leaders aren’t trained in fundamental workplace coaching skills, it can be a real challenge for them to connect with their people and make them feel as valued as possible.
Want to discover the key obstacle impacting your organization’s results?
If you’re wondering how Coach-Like Leadership will help with your external representation through your employer brand? Well, word travels fast.
If your workplace culture isn’t an ideal one to work for, people are going to hear about. Just look at the PR nightmare Amazon went through a couple of years ago with how they treated warehouse workers!
There are also many websites such as ratemyemployer.com that allow for ex-employees to talk about their time working for an organization anonymously.
In today’s world, it’s impossible for the sentiment about what it’s like to work for your organization to not get out into the public eye. But if you ensure your people are taken care of, your employer brand will become one of your organization’s greatest assets.
Making changes inside your organization to help build your employer brand all starts with teaching your people leaders fundamental workplace coaching skills. We call it Coach-Like Leadership. Coach-Like Leadership enables managers to better connect with their people and be agile and adaptive in today’s constantly-changing business landscape.
Coach-Like Leaders know how to lead with workplace culture in mind, understand when an employee needs support or autonomy through coaching conversations, and how to build action plans that propel employees towards their goals.
If you want to learn how Coach-Like Leaders can change your employer brand for the better, BOOK A DISCOVERY CALL with me.
