Growing a business is like building a house. When you have just 1 to 15 workers, you must lay the foundation and build the framework for your future growth. Even if you could simply triple your sales overnight, you wouldn’t have the procedures and talent you need to fulfill those sales.
As a small business owner, one of the most important things you can do to attract top talent is convey your mission and values. While employees work in order to get a paycheck, they could earn money anywhere. They choose specific businesses for the culture, benefits, and holistic package that the business offers. By learning how to build and market your employer brand, you can have an easier time reaching out to talented workers.
Why Your Mission and Values Matter
Your mission, vision, and values statements represent who you are as an organization. Over the years, these statements will serve as your company’s guiding light. By clarifying who you are as a company today, you will take the first step in determining who you will become. From a hiring perspective, conveying your mission and values has a few important benefits.
Differentiate Your Company From the Competition
When a potential job applicant looks for a job, they’ll see dozens or hundreds of different job postings. If you have a cookie-cutter, generic post, you’ll miss out on talented applicants. Instead, you need to think about what differentiates your company from the competition.
For example, some companies have a family-friendly environment or a strong focus on teamwork. By incorporating these values into your job posting, you can attract employees who will blend in with your existing organizational culture. Additionally, employees who don’t fulfill your values will self-select and apply to other companies, making your hiring process more efficient.
Once you do hire the employee, your mission and values become a fundamental reason why they decide to stay with your company. Whether you plan on building a colony on Mars or simply want to create the best meal kit for busy families, your mission is what sets you apart from the rest of the crowd.
Appeal to a Targeted Talent Pool
Conveying your mission and values to job applicants has another key advantage. It allows you to attract specific types of workers. During a recent Mission to Grow episode, Mary Simmons, Asure’s vice president of HR compliance, discussed a business she worked with that had a major retention problem. Among other issues, she discovered that they were using a bland job ad with no employment branding.
By using a bland ad, they were attracting a broad swath of applicant types. Unfortunately, many of these employees were simply a bad match for the business. The company never set expectations in their job ads. As a result, workers would get hired by the business and leave as soon as they realized it wasn’t the right fit.
Increase Employee Retention
When you convey your mission and values, it helps you attract like-minded employees. In turn, this increases your retention rates. 41% of workers report leaving their employer for a reason related to engagement and culture. In comparison, only 16% of workers left their employer for a reason related to pay and benefits.
Improve Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is closely correlated to employee retention. Additionally, engagement levels can also positively impact absenteeism, shrinkage, customer loyalty, and safety issues. To be engaged, workers need to feel like their jobs have meaning and purpose. This happens when they care and feel like they are a part of what your workplace stands for.
Spend Less on Hiring and Training
Ultimately, all of these benefits are reasons why conveying your mission and values can lead to lower spending on hiring and training. If you attract top talent and have engaged workers, you’ll experience lower turnover rates. In turn, lower turnover allows you to devote less of your budget to hiring and training new employees.
How To Convey Your Mission and Values
Your vision, mission, and values are the pillars that hold up your organization’s identity. They define who you are to your employees, vendors, customers, and stakeholders. By using the following steps, you can convey these aspirational qualities and goals to your current and future employees.
Brainstorm What Makes You Unique
First, you need to understand what sets you apart as an organization. If you don’t already have mission, vision, and values statements, right now is when you should start creating them.
Once you have a better understanding of your company’s identity, you can brainstorm ways to incorporate it into your HR processes. For instance, you may want to update your job listings with different benefits workers can get by joining your company. Your mission and values will likely guide how you onboard new hires, provide mentoring opportunities, and structure performance feedback.
Add Differentiators Into Your Job Listings
In the Mission to Grow episode on small business growth, Scott Petersen, the vice president and general manager at HireClick, discussed how small businesses need to revamp the way they approach their job listings. “The expectations of all small business owners should be aligned to [the idea that] hiring quality workers is difficult. It’s challenging. You need to be prepared, and you need to approach it much like selling or marketing. You really need to look at it like hiring is very, very much a selling or marketing function as much as it is an HR function.”
With this in mind, add differentiators to your job listings. A basic, help-wanted ad is only going to get you run-of-the-mill workers who will likely leave once they realize that your culture is a different fit than they expected. You need to incorporate differentiators that demonstrate what you care about and why an employee would want to work for your organization.
Incorporate Your Company Culture Into Onboarding
Once you’ve hired the perfect applicant, you have to follow through by creating the right onboarding process. An excellent onboarding process channels the excitement an employee feels during their first day at a new job. A good onboarding process helps workers feel more satisfied with their jobs, increases their preparation for their new roles, and improves retention rates.
Target Applicants Based on What Fits Your Culture
As you narrow down your company’s unique benefits and clarify your organizational culture, you can start targeting applicants based on who fits in with your culture. You can make this process easier by using AI-backed hiring software to create your listings and improve your company’s compliance. With the right technology, you can quickly create a customized listing with a handful of inputs.
Train Your Team on Your New Hiring Process
Once you’ve redesigned your hiring process to reflect your company’s culture, the next step is training your managers and HR team on the process. Besides teaching your team about HR compliance and the actual process, you need to give them training on what to look for in a new hire.
More importantly, your existing team members are ambassadors for your culture. They are often the first in-person contact new hires will make with your company, so they need to bring your values to life.
Build Rewards That Focus on Your Company’s Values
One truism about running a business is that you will always get the behavior you reward. Years ago, Enron famously collapsed because of unscrupulous behavior. Part of Enron’s problem stemmed from how its performance rewards focused on short-term earnings. This caused employees to prioritize any behavior that would pump up short-term earnings in order to get their bonuses, even when the behavior was blatantly unethical.
Because of this, it’s incredibly important to take your time and be strategic about the types of behavior that you reward. A reward is an excellent motivator for your workers, but you must ensure that it reinforces your existing values.
Learn How To Prepare Your HR Practices for Business Growth
As you grow from having just 1 to 15 workers, you have to be strategic about how you build your HR processes. You’ll need to bring on many new workers, and they need to be the right match for your organizational culture. By learning how to express your mission and values today, you can prepare your small business for a bright future.
To learn more about how to convey your mission and values in your HR practices, reach out to our team of small business payroll and HR experts today.