What Employees Want

In the past three months, a third of US workers seriously considered quitting their jobs. It is no wonder, then, that employers must strategize and deploy well thought out plans on how to keep their best workers.

Sometimes employers picture a needle that goes from hire to retention and they tend to skip all the degrees of activity in between. Employers need to start looking at the "eNPS-ometer" in stages, building a proper foundation first, and placing each building block in a way that leads to true employee loyalty.

Hire Right

It all starts with aspiring to a particular company culture through values, which are established and operationalized by the company. The company starts by hiring to the standards set by those operationalized values. After evaluating the candidate's competencies, knowledge and experience, there is more that needs to be assessed about the person you are contemplating for hire.

During the interview stage look hard at applicants. What's their true story? Some flags might be job hopping or lack of longevity at any one company. Look particularly at the success paths that the applicant can showcase over the course of their career history. Why are they leaving their current employment? Are they willing to speak ill of the company that helped them get to where they are now? Or, do they have a story that shares insightful reasoning about carving their path to a success that the prior company couldn't provide for them, at the time?

Link behaviors and patterns that you see in the applicant to the values set by the organization. How will they behave in the team setting that you have in place so far? Use tried and true methods to look deeply at inherent behavioral traits and see if the applicant indicates a match to be successful in the role. Have a team of "cultural champions" that can help assess candidates for the cultural fit to the organization.

Train & Develop Employees

After hire, a robust onboarding plan is in order. The employee will feel the most engaged and energized right after hire. Optimize that initial experience and draw it out into a great onboarding experience. Getting this right won't happen overnight and it won't happen without people, tools, time and energy. HR staff are critical to the building of the initial onboarding for the organization and helping hiring managers develop their initial training. Hiring managers are front and center in helping develop a longer, more extensive onboarding experience for their staff. Employees, acting as mentors, are also important to building the ongoing onboarding experience. It takes planning with every team and every level of the organization to create a well oiled onboarding machine.

After the onboarding experience, which can be as long as your culture and organization demands, an employee will continue to seek the value-add for their own development and career journey. Continued training and development will go a long way to make the employee feel valued and appreciated.

The employee will feel the most engaged and energized right after hire.

Advancement

Advancement doesn't always come from immediate promotion opportunities. Advancement can fall under the learning opportunities that are meaningful to the employee. This can be a course, a class, tuition reimbursement or it can be through training, coaching and career pathing. The employer is not able to provide a job promotion for every employee. However, if the employee can see a path that could lead to promotion- or dare say another company- down the line, it is meaningful to the employee. The goal is retention, of course. However, the employee should feel safe that, should something happen to their job or the company, they will be able to transition with continued experience and new skills to another job or company.

Benefits & Pay

Ensuring that the benefits and pay are competitive is also important to the employee. Sometimes employers forget to benchmark these things to the industry, company, market and size of organization. Employees who decide to "see what's out there" should come up short on what's being offered by competitors or other companies. This doesn't mean that positions have to pay the highest pay. Other factors can play a part in total pay and the overall value to the employee. Look at how your company is approaching work/life balance through flexibility, office experience, additional benefit perks and the overall work environment.

Employees who decide to "see what's out there" should come up short on what's being offered by competitors or other companies.

Purpose

Employees should be able to see how they individually contribute to the team goals, and overall, the company's strategic goals. This helps develop a sense of meaningful work and purpose. How do you provide a sense of purpose to someone, though, when that is different for each person? Keep in mind, people will find their own purpose. People inherently need to feel a sense of purpose, whether that is at work, in their personal life, religiously, or some other personal way.

During a management course in college, I recall the professor talking about how employees will find ways to provide their own sense of purpose and job satisfaction. He spoke of a case where a hospital was trying to find out why the engagement level of the night staff, in a coma unit, was higher than the day staff. As they explored the multiple possibilities, it all fell down to one thing that was happening that was different. During the night shift, the staff would change out the hospital unit's pictures- simply moving them from one side of the hospital and exchanging the ones in the coma unit. When asked for the explanation as to why, the staff said that they felt changing the environment for the coma victims was powerful in helping them to recover. They had created their own purpose, which increased their level of engagement. That stood out to me, because it doesn't have to be a huge thing for a company to provide something that brings employees a sense of purpose, and it can be done for groups of employees, not just an individual employee.

There are a number of simple ways to initiate discussions and planning that surround purpose and job satisfaction. One way to get this started is to form a Social Responsibility Planning Committee and start group thinking on how the company and employees can "give back" to the community.

They had created their own purpose, which increased their level of engagement.

Hopefully, you have enjoyed thinking along with me about what employees want. What are some other things that aren't mentioned in this article that you have experienced or want from your employer?