Small businesses face a common challenge. According to the 2018 Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Summit report, 70% of small businesses struggle to find and retain skilled talent.
At 70%, this issue is nearly a pandemic among small businesses. In fact, according to the Summit (the largest gathering of U.S. small business owners), recruiting was the top barrier preventing small businesses from growing more quickly. Without the right employees, it’s hard for small businesses to grow and thrive.
So, what’s a small business to do?
The good news is that there are many ways to attract and retain high-level talent. You just have to be more creative to sell what you have. Let’s take a look at five proven ways your small business can recruit and retain top talent.
Today’s employees value flexibility. Flex hours, flex days, and remote work provide employees with the ability to balance their work lives and their personal lives. Whether your employees struggle to juggle daycare schedules, band practice or trips to the gym, everyone benefits from some flexibility in life.
Chinese travel website Ctrip conducted an experiment where it allowed half of the workforce to work remotely for 9 months. When the experiment ended, Ctrip found that employees who worked from home were 13.5% more productive working than those who worked in the office. And the business saved roughly $1,900 in expenses per remote employee.
What you can do:
The promise of career advancement is a compelling enticement for new hires and current employees. Higher status, new challenges and an increase in pay are appealing, particularly for the top-level talent small businesses are seeking. If you want to attract – and hold onto – skilled employees, you have to give them opportunities to grow with your business.
The facts support this. A 2016 Gallup poll found that 87% of millennials feel that career growth opportunities are important in a job.
Newsflash – millennials are your employees!
However, small businesses often have short corporate ladders and limited funding for higher salaries. But, don’t be discouraged. While you may not be able to offer a corner office and a six-figure salary, what you do have can still be attractive:
The average American spends most of their day at work. so, if your business has a toxic work culture – retention will suffer and you’ll have trouble getting quality talent in the door.
But, if you build it (a positive work culture), they will come. A positive work culture has a tremendous impact on your employees.
Emma Seppala and Kim Cameron of the Harvard Business Review write in their article “Proof That Positive Work Cultures Are More Productive“:
“…a large and growing body of research on positive organizational psychology demonstrates that not only is a cut-throat environment harmful to productivity over time, but that a positive environment will lead to dramatic benefits for employers, employees, and the bottom line.”
Corporate culture can be a mysterious intangible thing. But it is immediately detectable. Here are some things you can do to build a positive workplace culture:
We’ve all heard that business is business. “It’s not personal.” But, work is personal. We work with people all day long. When companies fail to remember that employees are people, those companies falter. If you want to keep employees around, showing them care as human beings is a great way to do it.
I learned this lesson when I worked as a corporate trainer. We were taught that our students don’t care what you know, until they know that you care. So, in order to connect with and successfully train students, it was essential to treat those students with respect and care.
The same is true of employers and employees. Employees respect companies that respect them. And, employees want to invest in companies that invest in them. This reciprocity is actually a documented concept of social psychology. If you care about your people, your people will care for your business. Here are a few ideas:
Sometimes, you can get bogged down when hiring for a specific position. At other times, you need only part-time help or someone who can easily scale their hours to match your needs.
In such cases, consider crowdsourcing as a talent scaling solution.
There are three distinct ways using crowdsourcing platforms for your creative needs can help you better manage how you scale your team.
Many of our clients leverage crowdspring in just this way. Over the past decade, our community of 210,000 creatives has helped small businesses, entrepreneurs, agencies, brands and non-profits with their creative design needs. Other platforms, like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Upwork and MMO Freelance, are just a sample of sites offering freelancers, contractors and in-house temporary workers from across a wide range of professions and across all areas of industry.