Future Proof Archives

How To Become An Employer Of Choice (And Why You Should)

Do people want to work at your organisation?

Or probably the bigger question, rather than just wanting to work there, do they want to stay long term as it’s just a fantastic environment that can’t be beaten elsewhere?

If you can answer yes to both of those questions, then you have conquered an immense challenge and become an employer of choice.

If you think you might have some work to do or simply want to delight your staff, then this is the article for you.

We are going to discuss how to become an employer of choice and how to stay one so that your business can reap all the benefits that come along with this. Let’s dive in!

How To Become An Employer Of Choice (And Why You Should)

What Is An Employer Of Choice?

Being an employer of choice means being a company that is highly regarded by job seekers and employees. It is a place that stands out from other businesses as a preferred place to work due to the positive work culture, opportunities available and strong employer brand.

If you have managed to be recognised as an employer of choice, it means you have successfully created an environment where your team are engaged, motivated and satisfied with their work.

Ultimately, as an employer of choice, you will be able to attract and retain top talent, have low employee turnover rates, and have a great reputation in the job market. As well as that, you’ll typically enjoy greater productivity and loyalty from your team. You will be seen as a desirable employer and people will actively seek you out, aspiring to work for you.

Sounds pretty good, right? So, here are some of the ways you can foster this feeling at your workplace.

Your Brand, Their Choice

When it comes to being an employer of choice, reputation is everything. So, you want to develop a strong brand highlighting your company ethics, employee growth opportunities, a great culture, and stable finances.

How can you do all of that? Try some of these tactics:

Core Values

What makes your organisation different from other companies? It is your value proposition. So, part of building a strong employer brand is articulating what is unique about your business and why people will want to work with you.

Identify your core values, mission and vision and weave them into everything you do. Develop strong communication channels and ways to recognise your team’s achievements when they demonstrate these core values and help your business work towards your collective goals.

Purpose

A strong HR team can help to shape a company’s purpose. A purpose is about more than generating productivity and the work that your team will output. A purpose is about building a strong employer brand, displaying your ethics and giving your team something to connect with.

When the company and the team align behind strong values and a purpose you all become invested in something you believe in.

Connecting your company’s purpose to environmental, social and business goals and making those goals a part of your employer brand gives your company a powerful way to make an impact on the world and attract better talent along the way.

Growth Opportunities

Becoming an employer of choice will help you to retain quality team members. But, in order to retain those people long term, you will need to provide opportunities for growth and development. That can mean the chance to enhance their skills in certain areas, work on projects in their field of interest, and even ways to advance their careers.

Make sure your business offers training programs, mentorship and clear paths for progression.

Remuneration And Reward

It is important to back up your strong company culture and values with attractive remuneration. Obviously, you want to offer competitive salaries that align with (or better) industry standards. But it’s not all about money. There are other ways you can give your employees great benefits, such as flexible working conditions, rewards programs, and tailored incentives.

Being A Modern Employer Of Choice

In your quest to become an employer of choice, it’s vital to take stock of the current market conditions and what people are looking for in 2023. As we mentioned above, one of the fundamental changes we’ve seen is the importance of purpose in today’s organisations.

There are several driving forces behind this:

Demographic Changes

Both Millennial and Gen Z employees prioritise values and purpose more than the previous generations have. It’s not simply about the work they are doing, it is about the impact the business can have.

Meaning is becoming a key differentiator for company’s to retain and attract talent. A clear purpose not only helps to attract the right kind of talent, but it helps to engage your existing talented employees and boosts productivity.

Automation

We’re sure every one of you could list a boring or mundane task that you have had to complete in your working career that drove you up the wall. Thankfully, with the advancement of technology and the rising popularity of automation, those tasks might just be off your plate now.

Automation allows for repetitive, manual tasks to be handled by technology, rather than team members. And as these tasks are generally the first to be automated, they leave behind the more meaningful and rewarding tasks. Again, this gives your team the opportunity to work for a stronger purpose than data entry!

COVID

Yep, we mentioned the C word. While Covid provided a rather tumultuous season in our working careers, it actually helped a lot of people to realign their priorities when it came to their personal lives and career. As a result, the dramatic shift in feeling is that a company should have a purpose to make working life more meaningful.

Globalisation

Geography is no longer the barrier it once was. In days gone by, you had to live locally to the company you worked for or be willing to travel there. Now, it is easier than ever for companies to recruit staff or to have staff work from anywhere in the world. And there are compelling reasons to do so.

Globalisation means greater international collaboration and being able to work for an even wider purpose. So, this should be incorporated into your communication, onboarding, engagement and management strategies if you can make this happen.

Becoming An Employer Of Choice

As you have probably gathered, a strong HR presence is going to be key to becoming an employer of choice. The people are your company’s’s most important asset. And creating a strong purpose for them to unite under is the first step to becoming an employer of choice.

It can seem like an imposing task if you aren’t sure where to start. Luckily, the Spice Gals are here to help you. As experienced HR professionals and business owners ourselves, we understand the importance of uniting your team under a collective purpose.

Let us help you define and implement that purpose so that you can become an employer of choice. Book a time to chat with our team and take the first step towards purpose now.

When Automation Meets Human Leadership

It’s no secret that we are living in a world of developing technology.

And one of the biggest advancements in recent times is automation.

Incredibly helpful for streamlining processes and creating capabilities, automation is a useful tool that can aid with HR functions in your business.

However, it is important to remember that ‘Human’ is right there in the name when you are talking HR!

So, let’s explore what happens when Automation meets human leadership and how you can strike the right balance in your workplace.

When Automation Meets Human Leadership

What Is HR Automation?

HR automation refers to the use of technology and software to streamline and automate various Human Resource processes. This can include tasks such as record management, employee onboarding, performance management, payroll, and other administrative tasks.

There are a variety of HR automation tools available, with the most popular being an HR Information System (HRIS). These tools can help businesses save time and reduce errors by automating routine HR tasks, enabling employees to self-serve certain HR functions, and providing managers with better insights into employee performance and engagement.

Some of the benefits of HR automation include improved efficiency, increased accuracy, reduced administrative burdens, and better compliance with employment laws and regulations. Additionally, by automating certain processes, businesses can free up their HR team to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as employee development and engagement.

How To Use HR Automation

HRIS can help enhance engagement and productivity when it comes to the HR functions in your organisation. An HRIS can offer transparency and real-time data to allow for better feedback and reward and recognition.

Here are some of the benefits of using an HRIS in your business:

Easier onboarding

An HRIS can help to streamline your onboarding process as many of the manual tasks (like paperwork, orientation scheduling and sending welcome emails) can be automated. This can save your HR team time and creates an efficient process where nothing is missed. Onboarding progress can also be tracked, ensuring new team members are always fully onboarded and ready to start work.

By having a central platform that employees, managers and new hires can communicate through, it reduces confusion and ensures everyone is on the same page. Generally an HRIS also integrates with your other HR systems, such as payroll and recruitment platforms, so it makes it easy to have your new team member accurately set up in all the necessary systems and onboarded effectively.

Better training experiences

Even though automation is a big part of an HRIS, you are still able to personalise training programmes within the system, allowing managers to create tailored learning plans for individual team members based on their roles, skills and development needs. This is especially helpful as it means each training module is then relevant and useful to the individual employee, creating a more effective learning experience.

Having an HRIS that your team can log into means training material is easily accessible in one location, and everyone’s progress can be monitored.

Performance reviews

The automation capabilities of an HRIS can streamline your performance review process. Automate the tasks of scheduling review meetings, sending reminders to employees and managers, and collecting feedback from the right people to create an efficient, consistent and standardised review process.

Your system can also help you deep dive into performance data to identify high performing employees and areas of improvement. This helps with remuneration and creating plans for additional training and support where needed. Helpfully, this can also integrate with your payroll system too!

Having the review process standardised allows for timely feedback to be provided.

Staff engagement

You can use an HRIS platform for sharing employee appreciation and recognition. You can also track and monitor employee engagement outside formal review times via pulse surveys.

A wealth of data

Over time, an HRIS becomes a repository of HR documentation and employee history. It means you will always be able to lay your hands on specific HR detail when you need it.

It also allows for quick and easy reporting on HR data, creating the opportunity for analysis and prediction of trends that might influence your people strategy.

This data portal is not only of benefit to HR, it also has self-service elements to ensure leave requests and employee information remain up to date.

Keeps people connected

Workplaces have evolved in the last few years. While we used to all sit side by side in the office, things are quite different now. So, your HRIS can be used as an internal communication hub. This provides a seamless connection for all team members, whether they are in the office, working remotely, or a hybrid of the two.

Considering Human Leadership

Technology is clearly a massive part of our daily functions. But, we can’t rely solely on robots yet! There are simply some things that AI and automation systems cannot do. We still require strong human leadership to complement technological advancements.

Employees still want to be able to connect with their leaders on a human level. They don’t want leaders who are emotionally distant. They need connected, empathetic leaders who value investing in relationships with their team members.

Part of that is creating an environment of positive role models. It’s also about creating a great team vibe and leaders who provide personal and timely feedback on employee performance. Finally, today’s team members don’t simply want to work for managers, they want to collaborate on projects together and work for common business goals.

Leaders may need further training in soft skills to facilitate all of this. This will help them to develop trust and share accountability with their team. Remember that “Human Leadership” prioritises employee wellbeing and corporate culture. There is no longer a cookie-cutter approach to managing humans.

Balancing Humans And Automation

Creating the perfect working environment is about balance. You want to incorporate the benefits of automation that an HRIS offers, but ensure that your team is still backed by strong human leadership.

Need some help striking that balance?

Then the Spice Gals are here to help you do it. Have a chat with our team today!

Staff Retention: Why It’s The Key To Your Business Success

As an employer, what should be your biggest goal this year?

Bigger profits? More sales? Adopting AI?

While these things might be important, we strongly believe you should be putting your focus on another area of your business … staff retention.

Staff retention will be crucial for your organisation’s success as it helps to build continuity, reduce costs, increase productivity, improve customer service and SO much more.

So, how do you achieve good staff retention?

Let’s look into that concept now.

Staff Retention: Why It’s The Key To Your Business Success

The Importance Of Staff Retention

Good staff retention is excellent for your business, especially during the trying times we are currently living in. Here are just a few reasons why that is:

Saves Money: Recruiting and training new team members costs a lot in time, physical spend, and potential downtime for your business. That spend does not need to happen if you retain your current skilled staff.
Boosted Productivity: Experienced team members are more productive than brand new ones as they have a better understanding of your business goals and objectives. They are also more familiar with your culture and processes, allowing them to get on with their work quickly and effectively.
Great Customer Service: Being with an organisation for an extended period of time lets you get insight into the needs of the customers. This insight helps your experienced staff to deliver top level customer service; in turn, building customer trust and loyalty.
Knowledge Retention: By retaining your experienced employees, you also retain the knowledge they have developed while working with you. This knowledge is difficult to replace and can be critical to the ongoing success of your business.
Team Cohesion: High staff turnover is not good for team morale. It creates disruption and a situation where a continually changing set of personalities needs to find a way to work together harmoniously. Staff retention builds a more stable and cohesive team allowing for powerful collaboration.

These elements will be vital to the long-term success of your business.

Encouraging Good Staff Retention

With a potential recession looming, the last thing you want to be doing is replacing good employees because they are not feeling heard or valued. If your key employees walk out the door, then it will cost you a lot of time and money to replace them.

Retaining your key talent should be top of your priority list!

Here are just some of the ways you can do that:

Stay Interview

The Stay Interview is here to stay! But what is it? Well, a Stay Interview is when employees sit down with their managers to discuss their job satisfaction, goals and motivations. The purpose of the interview is to gather information about what is keeping them in their job and what factors might cause them to leave in the future.

The interview can be conducted at any time that the team member is working with an organisation. Its aim is to address any issues or concerns your employees might have and to set actions that will remedy those issues.

By taking the time to gain feedback from each of your employees, you can identify any areas of the business that might be problematic. Then, you can take steps to improve those areas and retain your vital team members. Those steps could be anything from training opportunities and providing more support to a change in job responsibilities or work environment.

Progression Pathways

With less time spent in the office, some skills are becoming obsolete and other roles are evolving. Employees are returning to the office after working remotely for some time. You will want to ensure that the role they were employed for still exists in the same capacity and whether their skills are still right for that job.

It’s time to take a deep dive into your business and the people you have working with you to create the right structure for everyone. You want to make sure each role is best suited for the employee undertaking it! So, talk with your team about valid career pathways so that everyone is in the best-fit role.

A really helpful tool for this is Extended DISC assessment. DISC is a form of psychometric testing that establishes each employee’s personality type. You can use the results to aid personal growth and to improve self-awareness, communication and teamwork. Here at Spice HR, we are Extended DISC Accredited Practitioners, so can help you get a true understanding of what makes your team tick.

Let Them Be Heard

Sometimes in an organisation, it can feel like there’s a disconnect between the team on the ground and the management team. Communication is the key to fixing any perceived divides.

You want your employees to feel heard, so the first step is to listen. This can be done in a range of ways. It can be as simple as a 10-minute one-to-one meeting where you give individual employees your undivided attention, or as complex as a companywide engagement survey.

Don’t forget that you actually need to do something with the feedback you receive from your team. Take steps to action any practical requests and look for ways to address issues.

Bring The Benefits

There are plenty of ways that you can implement initiatives that don’t cost a whole lot but can increase productivity and engagement hugely. Some of these are:

Flexible start and finish times
Create a wellbeing space in the workplace with accessible resources
Wellness challenges
Recognise awesome work with a company shout out page, brag board, or ABCD (above the call of duty) card
Offer mentorships with complementary colleagues
Discussions about career pathways and leadership opportunities
Offer longer break times
Bring your Pet to Work Day
Regular virtual meetups with fun activities like games or quizzes
Increased autonomy
A feedback box for input and suggestions from team members
Lunch with the boss days
Offer a 4-day workweek if that’s a possibility for your business. While team members are in the office for fewer hours, research has shown that their productivity is usually higher with a whole day of downtime up their sleeves.

There are also further benefits you can offer, but these ones will carry a cost for your business:

Extra leave
Give them their birthdays off work
Subsidised childcare
Bonus schemes
Professional development and training plans
Health insurance
Increased superannuation contributions
Regular remuneration reviews
Regular team lunches or outings
Wellness initiatives like courses, vouchers or partner discounts
Tickets to shows or sports games
Personal house cleaning
Employee anniversary celebrations

Encouraging Staff Retention

As you can see, there’s a lot to like about staff retention. But there is an awful lot that goes into retaining your high performing staff members.

So, if you know you need to retain your team, but would like a little bit of help doing it, the Spice Gals are here to help! Experts in people management, DISC assessment and building successful team morale, we can help you introduce simple retention initiatives that work.

Get in touch with our team today.

Future Proofing And Upskilling Your Team For The Year Ahead

The new year is always a great opportunity for a new start.

It is a time when most businesses set goals. But this year, your goal setting might look a little different.

2022 was a more challenging year than anyone anticipated. We were expecting it to be our return to normalcy and a time to find our feet again.

Instead, it was something quite different. Many of us reached the end of the year tired and burned out. 2023 looks like it may hold a whole new set of challenges, so let’s explore how you can future proof your business and your team by having a people focused approach for the year ahead.

Future Proofing And Upskilling Your Team For The Year Ahead

Set Your Focus

In previous years, your business goals were probably based on practical elements like growth and revenue targets. While you might still be setting these kinds of goals for 2023, it is also important to think about your key asset – the people element of your business.

Everyone has experienced a rough couple of years. While Covid restrictions have been lifted, life has not returned to the way it was before. As a result, people are tired and they are looking for more in their lives than simply going to work to earn a living. So, you’ll need to keep this in mind when setting your focus for the year ahead.

Your workplace should be a destination that people want to come to each day. Consider how you can make it a great, welcoming space and uphold a positive team morale. One way to do that is to build a focus on investing in your internal staff to retain the great talent you have.

Here are some ways you can do that.

Invest In Your Team

If you have amazing people in your team, your 2023 focus should be retaining and developing that talent. Why? Well firstly, you want to keep that great team!

Obviously, it is far easier to retain the amazing staff you have than it would be to hire new employees. Apart from the monetary cost to your business of advertising, hiring and training new staff, there is also an opportunity cost of losing great people. You may not be able to recruit others of the same caliber or those that work together as well as your current team do.

Plus, investing in your team is greatly rewarding. Not only do the employees you know, like, and trust gain greater skills and further their professional knowledge, but they also become more productive, loyal and motivated. This can only mean good things for them and for your business.

So, how do you do it?

Upskilling For All

In the last few years, it hasn’t felt as if there’s been much time for progression. The focus has been more about treading water and staying afloat to weather the current storm.

With many businesses starting to look to the future, what do you want that to look like for your team?”

The answer should be a happy, healthy, empowered team who enjoy their work. Some of that comes down to creating a great team environment to work in. But, another element is the chance for progression. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean promotions for everyone. Progression of skills and opportunities is also really attractive.

Types Of Upskilling

This 2023, factor in how you can upskill your staff. This can include team-wide skills training via workshops, conferences and training days. But, it can also include encouraging your staff to pursue individual interests via short courses and study programmes. These could be both free and paid courses to support the progression and growth of your team.

A vital area to include in your training programme is financial literacy. While this might not be pertinent to an employee’s professional role, it will certainly help them in a personal capacity.

Current economic predictions are quite bleak, so helping your team navigate the impending situation is not only responsible, but helpful for maintaining a calm workplace that is free from as much stress as possible.

Training The Trainers

Much of the internal training within a company falls to leaders and management. So, don’t forget to factor in training for the trainers!

Of course, that means the usual forms of professional development that you would usually have in place for your leaders. But, it also means exploring what it means to manage a team in a post-pandemic environment.

Consider what new ways of working mean for your company. Things like handling hybrid working and leading a remote team might be new for some of your management team. They might have leadership skill gaps that need plugging.

Implement training and development to address these areas and support them to confidently lead hybrid or remote teams and everything that comes along with working in 2023.

Ready to tackle 2023 head on? As we mentioned above, this year is likely to be a lot more people-focused than in previous years. You may find you need to revisit your HR policies and procedures.

If you need help with policies and procedures, upskilling, engagement or any other HR related questions the Spice Gals are here to help you!

The Importance of Job Descriptions for Staff Retention and Performance

The Importance of Job Descriptions for Staff Retention and Performance

When was the last time you reviewed the job descriptions for your team? If it’s been a while, then you’re probably underestimating the importance of these often overlooked documents.

Every New Zealand business uses job descriptions (we hope!), as it’s a legal requirement to provide one for each employee. But many businesses fail to leverage them to their full potential.

Often, they end up tucked away in a virtual file, only to be dusted off and reviewed next time a position needs to be filled.

If this sounds familiar, it’s time to change the way you approach your job descriptions.

By keeping them up to date and using them as a management tool beyond the recruitment process, you can help shape your company culture, increase staff retention and performance, and future proof your business.

Here are some of the ways the not-so-humble job description can help level up your business.

Effective Recruitment

Job descriptions are most often put under the spotlight when it’s time to recruit for a role. So, this is the ideal time to ensure they are accurate and up to date.

This is your opportunity to attract someone who not only has the right skills for the job but is also the right fit for your company culture.

The more accurate the job description is, the better it will be at attracting high-quality candidates. This streamlines the entire recruitment process and makes it easier to select someone who will add value to your business.

Remember, cultural fit is just as important (if not more so) than skills fit. Skills can be taught or improved, but personal attributes are way less pliable!

Job descriptions are also important from a legal perspective. They can be used to demonstrate that there are legitimate, non-discriminatory considerations used in the hiring process.

Improved Staff Performance and Productivity

The recruitment process may be over, but the position description’s job is far from done! In fact, this is where the real spicy work begins.

We know that effective communication is vital to the success of any organisation. Well, your job descriptions are excellent communication tools. They clarify the expectations for employer and employee, leaving no room for ambiguity or confusion – if they’re honest and up to date!

Job descriptions help your team understand exactly what they should be doing, providing direction and meaning to their roles which help promote job satisfaction and increase engagement and productivity.

Beyond the day-to-day tasks, well-written job descriptions communicate how each team member contributes to the success of the organisation and outlines how they can continue to grow within their role.

They establish a set of expectations that assist with performance development and help prevent or resolve any grievances that arise.

Increased Retention

What happens when employees are confused about their responsibilities, mismanaged, or faced with tasks that lie outside of their skillset?

Frustration, decreased productivity, lack of engagement, conflict, and potentially, lost employees.

All this can result from outdated, inaccurate, or poorly written job descriptions.

However, nailing the job description ensures you attract candidates who are an excellent fit for the role. When your team are aligned with the culture and values of your business, they’re far more likely to enjoy and value their work and stick around for longer.

That means increased retention and reduced costs associated with recruitment.

Future-Proofing Your Business

Do your job descriptions reflect what is actually happening in your business as well as address the future needs of the business?

Is there a skill shortage now, or will there likely be one in the future? Are your employees already stretching beyond their job descriptions? Is there a mismatch between the needs of your business and the abilities of your team?

Job description reviews are a great way to answer the big questions that help you future-proof your business. They allow you to effectively structure and align roles within the business and pinpoint gaps that need attention, whether via training and development or specialist recruitment.

Is It Time to Review Your Job Descriptions?

If your job descriptions have been a little starved for attention of late, now is the perfect time to assess your team and identify any gaps. This leaves you plenty of time to come up with a plan of action for the new year.

Great job performance starts with recruiting the right talent. Alongside a well-defined job description, an Extended DISC report on potential candidates can help you identify new hires that are going to be a great fit for your role and culture.

Spice HR offer DISC Recruitment Reports that can assess how well candidates align with the role.