Why on earth would anyone want to work for you?

Just because you’ve made the decision to get into business, it doesn’t mean people are going to be flocking to work for you.

The job market is insanely huge, and with employees wanting to work from home and during the hours that suit them, you have to be worth working for in order to get a look in.

There are basically two ways you can do this.

One – you pay them. Seems obvious right. You put a job on Seek, people apply for the job, they come in, they have the skills your looking for, you hire them and then pay them to perform the required function.

Ultimately they work for you because of the pay cheque.

But what happens when things get difficult or hard? What happens when other priorities pop up?

Are they going to sacrifice your priorities for their own? After all, the only reason why they are there is because of the money which they can get from a whole range of different sources.

I prefer option two, which is to create a movement.

I don’t care if you’ve got a directional drilling business, a concrete business, a web design business or an accounting firm – you should always try and create a movement around what it is that you do.

People like to work for something bigger than themselves that makes them feel good about what they do.

You need to define what you stand for and then learn how to communicate it with your team in a meaningful way. And you can do that with these steps.

1) Define the company vision

To me a vision is made up of three things. Number 1, what is the purpose of the business? This is essentially why the business exists. It has to exist to serve because you don’t do a purpose, you serve a purpose.

2) Define the company mission

What is it that the business is trying to do in the next five to 10 years?

The mission should be directly aligned to the purpose. You want to be thinking of the amount of clients you want to be serving, the reach you want to have, the people’s lives you want to touch… and then what the financial outcomes of that will be. But money shouldn’t be a focus because if you’re executing on the mission properly money will be a natural consequence.

3) Define the company values

You need to be able to communicate are the company values. This is your company GPS system. It’s the benchmark behaviours and traits that you are looking for to be demonstrated naturally in the individuals that you want to be working with, but most importantly the behaviours that are demonstrated by you.

When defining values most people look and how they would like to be, not how they are, and to me is nothing more than aspirational.

Values need to be generated from within based on the things that are important to you that you demonstrate on a regular basis. And if you’re not already doing them you need start doing them over and over again until they become automatic behaviours.

When you’re clear on the purpose, mission and values you can then communicate them to your team and during the interview process in a very compelling way and all of a sudden you have people who are sitting in front of you who are talent – who don’t do a job because they get paid, they do it because they love it and they’re just looking for the right home that they can put their bags in.

What we’re talking about here is culture. The root of a culture is a movement and a stand for something you believe in that others can believe in too.