While it is natural to think carefully about how customers might think about your brand, are you applying the same level of consideration to your employees?
This includes the employees that you have yet to hire as well – positioning your brand in such a way as to be as appealing to prospective applicants as possible.
Understanding the factors that might improve or damage this perception can help make your brand a much better home to talent.
Your employees might want to stick around for longer and those in the future might have you in mind for a destination for their long-term careers.
Salary, Benefits and Perks
The most straightforward option might feel like a too basic approach but can still be very effective. If you are hoping to draw more applicants and employees toward your business, it is worth considering where you are currently dragging your feet.
Understandably, you might feel you are not able to offer as much as your competitors in this regard, but that might be something you can compensate for through other benefits.
If the salary that you are offering for the same job is slightly less than that of a larger business in your sector, for instance, why not slightly reduce the hours?
This might help employees feel as though they’re getting a better work/life balance, and you might not suffer any loss of work due to the increased productivity that could come with this.
Career Progression
If current and future employees see your business as nothing more than a stop-gap – a way of making money while searching for a real job – that could be a problem.
You want your business to feel like where those in your industry go to hone their skills and find a career that they stick with for a long time.
A lot of this might be achieved through training in relevant areas and by having higher roles for them to work into – giving them a sense of exactly how they would progress within your business.
It could also help if you’re using competitive industry tools that people might be looking to gain experience in, such as API management tools for web design.
Work Environment, Attitude to Staff
When you are considering employee perception and staff retention, there is more that you need to consider.
The salary and other immediate benefits might not be enough to keep people around and keep employees thinking of you positively if the time spent at work is miserable.
Your relationship with your employees is one that you have to work on – they will not trust you more than any other employer immediately.
It is only by seeing how you let them work that this opinion will form. That means that you need to get a good idea of what a positive work environment looks like so that any new arrivals into your business can fit seamlessly into it, without worrying about needless hostilities or tensions that arise around the workplace.
