It’s a phrase we use a lot at FiveFour because it describes what we help businesses do. It applies to a lot of aspects of your business, particularly when it comes to building your team.
Hiring is a top-of-the-mind topic among almost all the business leaders I talk to. It is also the topic of this article in the Harvard Business Review – “Attracting Talent During a Worker Shortage.” In it, the authors cautioned employers against the idea that workers are going to come flowing back as unemployment benefits run out.
In some areas, the labor market is so tight that restaurants and stores are limiting hours or closing a couple of days a week because there are not enough people to run the place.
I recently came across a Subway that was closed for this very reason.
There are examples everywhere you go.
Which is why it’s more important than ever for business leaders to “select” their teams, not “hire” to fill openings.
Now, you might be thinking, “Are you nuts? How do I select employees when I can’t even get enough applications to fill the jobs I have now?”
It’s a fair point as we reel from the aftershocks of the Covid pandemic.
However, this isn’t the time to panic. It’s time to put in place the systems and principles to guide your business through a crisis and into long-term stability.
Grow your business from the inside out.
That starts with your team. As we say, you can’t stage a world-class customer experience without a world-class team.
And that means remembering you have two types of customers. The external – the people who give you money. And the internal, your employees.
In successful companies, the ones that best weather crisis, the customers and employees have a common trait.
It’s loyalty.
We know that customer loyalty is the No. 1 predictor of company profit. That’s because loyal customers are the ones who have remarkable experiences. They are the ones who tell all their friends and family about how great you are.
Employee loyalty is the same.
Last week, I wrote about how it’s more important than ever to invest in employee learning and development. In fact, research from Gallup shows us that companies that commitment to development average 11 percent higher profitability than those that do not.
You can read my two previous installments on this topic. (Don’t ‘hire.” Select and retain. and How do we reduce turnover?)
How do you build employee loyalty?
“Convincing your organization to make significant changes to their recruiting strategy might be the hardest part of improving your hiring results,” said the authors of the Harvard Business Review article. “…remember, if it were easy, you probably would have already done it — and so would have a number of the other companies scrambling for available workers in your market.”
Developing quality workers from within will pay off in multiples when compared to recruiting strategies. Find out what your people want, what makes them feel valued in their work, and how to help them become better at their jobs and in their profession.
One of the best ways to tap into worker sentiment is using the Net Promoter Score. Yes, the same tool we use to determine public loyalty and perceptions can be used for your internal customer.
The Employee Net Promoter Score is a measure of your team’s loyalty and the reputation of your company.
It’s also a way for you to find out what they want. Is it location, commuting time, the structure of the workweek, some particular benefit? You can’t deliver everything to everybody as an employer. But you don’t know what people want unless you ask.
We can put an ENPS system in place for your company so you can start growing from the inside out.