News & Views
IS YOUR COMPANY A BLUES OR A CRUSADER WHEN IT COMES TO ATTRACTING TALENT?
Attracting and retaining current staff through your culture, supported by structured programs to build the capability of existing employees, allows organisations to control reward blow-outs, recruitment costs, and maintain consistency and quality of customer service. Talent attraction and retention is critical in ensuring an organisation meets its end goals.
The true costs of failing to attract or of losing talent through poor management or lack of nurturing are numerous. These can include impact on client relationships, recruitment, training costs, induction programs, workplace morale and overall business effectiveness.
And the cost of failing to attract and retain the best talent isn’t limited to the business arena, compare the recent fortunes of the Crusaders and Blues in the rugby’s Super 12/14 competition
A Blues or a Crusader?
One of the reasons for the on-going Crusaders dynasty is an astute talent attraction and retention program built upon a strong culture of success. Players such as Tony Marsh (France), Ron Cribb and Bradley Mika (both All Blacks) have gone on to international rugby after leaving their home bases to try their hand with the Crusaders.
In 2005, (then coach) Robbie Deans hit the jackpot again with his talent spotting by snapping up the services of Rico Gear, who went on to make the All Blacks after a stellar Super 12 where he topped the try-scoring charts by touching down 15 times. Compare this to the recent woes of Auckland Blues where since Carlos Spencer disappeared in mid 2005, the Blues have tried Tasesa Lavea, Luke McAlister, Isa Nacewa, David Holwell, Nick Evans and Jimmy Gopperth in the No 10 role without any great success or security. They then canvassed specialists from England's World Cup winning hero Jonny Wilkinson, Manawatu's Aaron Cruden, Argentine Juan Martin Hernandez, All Black supremo Daniel Carter to Bay of Plenty’s Mike Delany all without success.
Clearly the Blues are not as an attractive organisation (or have as strong an Employee Value Proposition) to potential employees as that of the Crusaders. And a key ingredient to the attraction and retention of the best players/employees is the culture that exists within the Crusaders organisation, as seen in the following chart the companies with the best culture perform better.
The best companies perform better (1)
The Fortune 100 ‘best companies to work for’ have provided a higher return than the market over seven years.
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1. Great Place
to Work Institute and Frank Russell Company, 2005
The Fortune ‘100 Best Companies To Work For’ hypothetical portfolio comparison assumes that in 1998 equal dollar amounts were invested in the stock of every public company on the list. The portfolio was liquidated at the end of each year and funds were reinvested in equal dollar amounts for every public company on the following year’s list. This process continued through 2004. |
Companies need to have the right corporate culture in place if they are to acquire a competitive advantage – or else risk losing market share!
The recruitment and retention of staff are the biggest challenges facing Companies today. And most businesses typically find that it is the cultural side of a business which restricts its success and, more likely than not, competitive advantage.
The vexing issue is that heads of companies know culture is important but invariably don’t know how to tackle the issue front on,” As a working principle, culture is the way people are expected to behave in an organisation by way of the messages that are conveyed. Those messages represent what is actually valued and what is important, what people do to fit in, to be accepted and to succeed. Sending and receiving the right messages allows people to adapt their behaviour and spread the message accordingly resulting, ideally, in a change of culture.
An organisation’s strategy must determine the type of culture they require. The challenge is not in the understanding of the impact of culture on a company’s success but how to ignite the culture alignment path of getting the right culture in place and attracting the right people. ‘Good culture’ is a winner – once you get it right – and is a strategy to produce both short and long returns for a company. For those companies that do get it right, culture becomes an enabler of significant organisational initiatives.
Putting attraction, retention and development into the context of culture
OCG Consulting works with organisations to establish their attraction and retention strategies in the context of a carefully designed and executed culture by following a simple 5 step program:
Step 1: Define your business strategy
Step 2: Assess your current culture and identify if it is the right one to achieve your business strategy
Step 3: Understand and act on the results of your current culture audit
Step 4: Prepare an EVP based on your desired culture
Step 5: Execute the EVP by living the values through your all parts of your business
And once I have attracted them, how do I retain them?
Retention is largely dependent on three factors:
· Recruiting the right people. People who are aligned to your values and aligned to your culture and therefore aligned to your strategic aspirations
· Making the optimum match between a job and the person’s skill and, particularly, their motivation.It is becoming increasingly important these days to look first for the soft skills of people leadership, the ability to learn quickly and the right attitude. Technical knowledge is much more easily transferred and hard skills are much more easily taught than the art of leadership and the passion for being in your job.
· Consistently delivering on your employee value proposition (EVP), every day, from the first day.
Remember, new employees
get a majority of their
information on "how we do things around here”
from your current staff and other messages and
symbols throughout your business. Having the
ideal EVP written in an induction manual presented
to new staff on their first day will be worthless if the
"way we do things
around here” is not represented
through the culture of your organisation. Employees
will sense this misalignment very quickly.