Using Salary To Attract Employees

There is this story about Abraham and Lot in the Bible. They had two options to choose from: a company that offered better pay and one that doesn’t. Lot decided to go with the one that offered more benefit and left the other for Abraham. He must have thought he had gotten the best deal. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so. It ended up costing him much more than he had.

Companies that use salary to attract the best talent, might be hiding their culture. Lot saw what was pleasing to the eye and got enticed but he never knew it was more like an iceberg. The culture he couldn’t see ended up suffocating his potential.

I am not against paying employees well, however, if that is what an organization offers to attract talent, then something is fishy. A salary should be compensation for the value you bring to the table. At first, a salary may be a great motivator to join a company. But after receiving the salary for a while, the culture takes over. There is no amount of compensation you receive can compensate for being robbed of your potential.

You can attract talents using a salary as bait, but the salary isn’t enough to keep them employed. Your culture only has the power to retain talents. If an organization uses salary as bait, then most likely it doesn’t have a culture that treats people as humans. Some of these companies will work out that compensation for you. The time you are supposed to spend with and building your family will be spent at home.

The question employees need to ask themselves to understand the power of culture is that if we pay the standard in the industry and someone offered our people more, will they join the other company? If they will come back to you, then your culture is the reason why they are working with you. But if they leave, you will need to check your culture.

When you have high turnover, you should focus on innovating your culture rather than increasing the perks and benefits of working with you. People want to feel valued and appreciated. They want to know that they have a future with you. They want to know that by helping the company achieve its vision, their vision will also be realized.

Getting huge pay package is good but being treated like a million dollar while earning good pay is the great. Working for a cause bigger than life is far more exhilarating than just working for a big pay. If you work in an organization that has great culture, where people have freedom to create value, you can earn whatever any organization can offer you.

Culture is far more important than the pay package. Some culture will pay you well but stifle your ability to create and innovate. You earn much more than you have ever dreamt of, but you don’t have the time to grow, improve, learn new skills and create. You are so engrossed at work that you don’t become a better version of yourself. That way you become outdated without knowing.

Employees who know their salt will take a job for whom they will become and the freedom to do the work they love and create value than for what they will receive as compensation. If you have the potential to create value that will pay you millions of dollars as compensation, yet you accept a role in a company where you are paid hundreds of thousands without the freedom to create value, you lose. The culture will either liberate the creativity of people or hinder it.

Culture should be the selling point of every organization. Companies should be known more for their culture than their compensation. They should promise employees who they are going to be rather than what they are going to earn. The culture should be so designed to fulfill the promise of value to employees.

In the end, people will not remember your company for what you pay them but for how you make them feel, who you help them become, what you empowered them to do and what freed their creative potential and confidence to make happen. Build a human-centered culture and you will attract the kind of people who want to work significantly and make a difference in the world.

Are you experiencing difficulty trying to get your people to bring their A-game to the workplace? People can be innovative when they are engaged. When you transform into Truly Human, you will help your people unleash their innovative ingenuity. We can help you with that. We can help you transform your culture to be human-centered and innovate your business model to support your culture. Let’s start the conversation here [email protected].

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