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What’s the greatest constraint to growing your business; winning new business or recruiting and keeping great people? More and more, it is becoming the latter. In 2009 I wrote “soon there will be a dearth of talent so significant, that bad work environments and unhealthy cultures will become much rarer. This will be due to the greatest onslaught of people ever to hit our economy, Baby Boomers, leaving the workforce.
Here's how you keep great people...
1. Take an assessment of your culture.
Ask: What are the limiting beliefs we have as an organization? Then ask: What are the empowering beliefs that we have as an Organization? What is the impact of those beliefs? As compared to other similar businesses, how engaged and happy are your people at the workplace? If you can’t measure it, it will be hard to know when you have improved. Whether you have outsiders familiar with many other workplaces give you feedback on how well you’re doing, or you conduct thorough and honest exit interviews with former employees, you’ve got to take your pulse and know the condition of your heart.
2. You must set cultural objectives.
Most companies don’t have clear objectives in regard to their culture. These are companies who have never had a competent strategist assess the thoroughness of their objectives. These objectives will be measurable, timed and challenging, and they will relate to changing the beliefs that will thus change the behaviors of you and your people.
3. Implement unique rules and rituals.
These are practices so memorable, meaningful or maniacal that they make permanent impressions, ideally both inside and outside of your company. At Quicken loans, the founder, Dan Gilbert insists that every employee return every customer call and email the same day. Even if the call or missive comes in minutes before you leave the office, you are expected to return it before you leave. Dan would give his direct line out at orientations and tell new hires, “if you’re too busy to return a call, call me, and I’ll do it!”
You are in a battle for the best people in the marketplace. To get them, you need to be the best workplace. To be a great place to work, you need a compelling culture.
About Mark Faust
Each Tuesday, turnaround consultant Mark Faust will be sharing his expertise on how to turn around your small business. His blogs will be filled with practical insights and basic turnaround strategies designed to guide you through crisis leadership and change management. You'll be able to tap into tips on everything from profitability issues, business continuity plans and pandemic pivots to operational processes, marketing and customers additional value.
As one of the companies he helped grow, we know first hand how inspiring his leadership is and just how well it works! Mark has also agreed to make his best-selling book ‘Growth or Bust’ available, free of charge, to any small business to help them create their own effective turnaround plan. We’ll be sharing that with you soon.
You can learn more about Mark and his company, Echelon Management, by clicking here.
Looking for more small business help?
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The Ultimate Small Business Survival Guide is Here
We've been helping InspireHUB clients not just survive during this time but THRIVE! We collected all of our advice and made it available for FREE as our great big give-back during this difficult time. Included in this FREE Guide:
- Transformation Readiness Assessment
- Practical Marketing Help
- Proven Strategies to Pivot Your Company
Lead an Inspirational Remote Work Culture that Employees Love!
At InspireHUB, we get it. We've been a 100% remote workplace for more than 7 years, and are the first to admit we were UN-InspireHUB while we learned to grow into it.
because we saw so many people struggling as they've had to adapt to this new way of working overnight.
Here's how you can use it to grow YOUR small business too ...
Included in this FREE Guide:
- Why your remote team is experiencing fatigue.
- Understanding how leaders and employees have vastly different remote experiences.
- The lines you cannot cross with employee privacy when working remote.
- How to gamify your remote workforce.
- The rules of virtual engagement when it comes to working remotely.
- How the rules of meeting etiquette change in virtual meetings and why you must understand the difference!
At InspireHUB, we’ve been blessed with a network that includes some of the foremost leaders in the world. A few years ago, we had the pleasure of meeting Mark Faust. Mark has over thirty years of experience in helping companies turn around through his company Echelon Management International. The brands he’s helped include John Deere, Apple, Bayer, IBM and P&G. He also helped me personally and professionally with InspireHUB as we morphed to become the company we are today.
His insight and expertise are invaluable, but realistically, the majority of small businesses would never get access to a “Mark” due to the size of their budget. Having someone like Mark literally can be a life-saving exercise for any size business. What impressed me the most about the work Mark and I did together was the bulk of it was not business tactics and strategy; it was about myself as a leader. Understanding what motivated me, where I found my hope, what would INSPIRE me to wake up every day and work on this business.
Do you and your team wake up to a purpose or an alarm clock? Many of the greatest leaders and organizations of this world create a fervor within themselves that is so intense that it is contagious, inspirational and life-changing in those with whom these influencers work and live.
What makes these great influencers so powerful is their driving purpose.
A driving purpose is often present in the most vibrant of non-profits. It’s a driving purpose that empowers many of the most successful businesses. But the untapped potential for businesses in general, the potential for much-accelerated growth, the potential for a cadre of businesses to actually buoy the economy is there—if only they identify and carry out their driving purpose.