Guest Blog: The Attraction & Retention Of Office Staff – Part 1

Want to emulate what the ‘best businesses’ are doing to attract and retain the best talent? As business leaders and motivators you will know how hard it is to attract and retain top talent – it is ‘tough’! Yes, many components of ‘what attracts’ the best talent is difficult or expensive for smaller and mediums size businesses to emulate. These include access to private health care, pension top ups, crèche facilities, private concierge and even free food pantries (thanks Google). But there are some things that are easy and a lot less expensive to put in place. I’m not going to bore you with Hertzberg’s Theory of Motivation– although I can do if you wish! What I will say is, the best leaders and motivators know that money is not the key in this situation. “Yes”, your people need to feel rewarded and ‘equity’ for what they do, but it’s the non-financial rewards that they really value and these are key to motivation. Go on just Google ‘Hertzberg’. Would it be useful to know what your employees value and what they don’t? I facilitate organisational events that focus on just that. Now each organisations results are different, as our often the sub-teams within them, but there are some common and reoccurring themes. One that reoccurs time and time is the ‘office environment’. As well as facilitating team events, I conduct exit interviews, new starter reviews and of course as part of talent searching, I talk to hundreds and hundreds of people about what they are looking for from their next career move. There is no getting away it is an important factor. It might be that your office environment is great which is excellent. It might be that you just haven’t seen it through the lens of others for some time. Or a common theme I find is that it has become ‘invisible’ to those managing the business. Not because they are complacent but because what we see every day quickly becomes unseen – it is a well-researched phenomenon. Also, the longer we are somewhere the less we have to ‘benchmark’ against others. However, I can ‘hand on heart’ say that ‘office environment’ will appear either on the ‘what we like around here’ or ‘what we don’t like around here’ statements – obviously depending on what it is like. Either way, it is something your employees’ value. You are probably thinking, “It sounds expensive?” Well possibly if you look at it from a purely ‘cost’ lens! But this is balanced out when you take into account “what will attracting and retaining talent mean for our business?” Also, there are small things that we can do to make a big difference. Either way it is something the wise business leaders consider fully and not just because they know the office environment reflects their Brand and Corporate Identity but is also intrinsically linked to how they value their staff. If you want to know what your employees value I can help. I’m not a great believer in long drawn-out and expensive employee satisfaction surveys. I suspect you aren’t either! My workshops are designed to elicit open feedback from EVERYONE. So if you are interested in learning more about what your staff really value – even having solutions and a potential action plan presented to you that YOUR staff have developed and are committed to, let me know. I will support you in developing your team through recruitment, developing retention strategies and team development. Keep an eye out for part 2 of an employers point of view – coming soon.

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