Wouldn’t it be nice to be labeled an employer of choice? 

Imagine: when you put out a job posting, potential candidates’ eyes light up. They know you offer an amazing working environment; they’ve been waiting for their chance to apply! Imagine getting to hand-pick the best employees around.

Imagine: your employees look for their next opportunity within your organization—instead of browsing job boards. They know the grass is greener where they are; they respect their colleagues and managers; they’re invested in your mutual success. Imagine investing in their growth—and your company’s growth—instead of spending resources to find and train their replacements.

It’s a pretty picture, isn’t it? But if you’re running a small business, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking: that’s not in the cards. Becoming an employer of choice is for other businesses with more spare time and heaps of spare cash lying around—it’s probably a title reserved for those tech companies with deep-pocketed investors.

That is fundamentally untrue. Becoming an employer of choice is not a matter of throwing money into perks and benefits.

It doesn’t take massive investments, catered lunches, or bean bag chairs to win over employees’ loyalty. In fact, you don’t have to spend a dollar more than you already are. All you have to do is choose a new way to manage your business.

Choosing Your Employee Management Cycle

There are two modes your business can operate in. One is reactive, the other is proactive.

In the first, you respond to employee issues as they arise: an employee quits, and you scramble to replace them; someone’s performance slips, and you dock their pay; an accident occurs, and you accommodate paid time off. In this mode: you invest your time and money into fighting fires. Meanwhile, your turnover is high, morale is low, and both productivity and profitability are slipping.

In this reactive mode, your investments are not yielding the best results.

In the second mode, you get ahead of employee issues: you hire the right people, they fit better, and they stay longer; you implement health & safety training and procedures, you avoid incidents, and keep people at work; you create and review career progression plans, and employees stay engaged; you offer tailored health benefits plans, and people show up for work happier and healthier.

Here, your investments have clear payoffs.

The neat thing about these two cycles, is they cost the exact same. For every proactive investment we make in improving our business, there are corresponding cost savings from issues we avoid down the line. For that reason, becoming an employer of choice is a self-funding process. That process is called Employee Investment Optimization.

EIO & the Transformation Journey

Employee Investment Optimization is not a matter of fixing one thing. You can’t choose a new health benefits plan and magically win employees over. But, the EIO journey begins when you fix any one thing. 

EIO is an ongoing cycle of addressing an issue, saving money, and reinvesting in smarter ways. For example: 

• We can start with benefits, choosing a new plan that better suits your employees; 
• This might reduce turnover by 10%, which saves you thousands of dollars in hiring and training replacements;
• With those savings, you can implement new cross-functional training programs to make your employees more productive and versatile;
• This might further reduce turnover and limit your need to hire externally for senior roles

Change one thing, and like dominoes, opportunities for further savings and investment optimization start falling into place.

Getting Started with an EIO Health Check

Everyone’s optimization journey will be different. Some struggle most with recruiting; others with health & safety or government compliance; others with skyrocketing benefits rates. While any step we take will be a step in the right direction, it helps to know which will yield the biggest immediate results.

With that in mind, we suggest listing out your priorities before making any moves: what are your biggest inefficiencies? Where are your riskiest liabilities? What’s the biggest cause of employee dissatisfaction? 

To quantify current issues, risks, and investments, you need to perform an EIO Health Check. Go through every aspect of employee management and find the dollar-value of your present operations. 

For example:

• What is your annual rate of turnover, and how much does it cost to bring on replacements?
• What are you paying in excess WSIB premiums?
• How much of your benefits premiums go towards claims?
• What fines and lawsuits are you exposed to?

Answering these questions is the first EIO decision we face: do we invest an hour of time now to better plan for a transformative journey? To make this step even more of a no-brainer, our experts are available to help you go through a 1:1 EIO Health Check—completely free of charge.

In a 90-minute meeting (in-person or online), an EIO Expert will help you complete an EIO Scorecard to reveal both tangible and hidden costs of your current practices; take you through a Leadership Team Behavioural Assessment to better understand your management styles and profile the right people to hire; and create an EIO Action Plan to detail the next few steps in your optimization process.

Coming out of your session, you’ll know exactly how to transform your business and win—and keep—the best employees in your industry. 

Book a discovery call, and your journey will be underway!