Posted by Cathryn Edmondson on 21 July 2020
The importance of culture when recruiting
Employee engagement | Culture | Employee Experience | Recruitment
An effective company culture permeates the entire employee lifecycle from the recruitment process through to the time an employee leaves the business and can act as a strong stable core within an organisation. Each company will have a unique culture but there are common building blocks to any successful company culture. A clearly articulated set of company values, how employees are recognised for performance and contribution, the organisations approach to reward, the social activities organised by the company and how communication flows within the business, all add to the culture of an organisation. Performance management also plays a key role in driving culture and can breed dissatisfaction if mismanaged. However, having a clear philosophy around how performance is measured and how it relates to reward brings clarity and consistency.
Establishing Authenticity
Regardless of programmes and initiatives in place they can only be effective if they are authentic and role-modelled by the leaders. Values must be felt within an organisation, and not just exist on a screen saver. The employee value proposition (EVP) portrayed in your selection process must be felt by employees within the organisation and align to your customer value proposition. The last few months have put businesses under extreme pressure, but future candidates will judge businesses on how they treated their employees during this pandemic. Businesses need to balance immediate needs with the long-term impact on their EVP that will remain for many years.
Remaining true to your core values
Protecting you company’s culture during a period of growth can be difficult. As the workload grows the weekly communication briefings get shelved, tempers fray due to stress meaning company values of respect and collaboration erode, the annual summer BBQ gets forgotten as no one has the capacity to organise it. Quite quickly, the culture is diluted, coupled with an environment that feels much more volatile and uncertain. Taking the time to understand how your employees are feeling when undergoing rapid growth will help keep employees engaged and avoid the more costly and time-consuming consequences of not protecting your culture and losing key talent. Utilising technology to run pulse surveys and looking at data on benefit utilisation can all help identify where the consequences of rapid growth are impacting employees and mitigate any negative feelings before they escalate.
Recruiting Strategicially
Rapid growth can inevitably lead to increased hiring but the timing of hiring new employees can be tricky. Leave it too late and your existing team start to disengage, and training new team members becomes yet another task on an insurmountable workload. However, recruit too soon and it can add strain to cashflow. Talent can be difficult to find and the pressure the alleviate the workload of an overly stretched team can lead to hiring people who are not aligned to your culture. Taking a strategic approach to organisational design through forecasting resourcing needs and modelling different scenarios can help avoid some of the potential pitfalls of rapid recruitment.
If you’d like to discuss ways in which you can ensure your culture remains intact through periods of growth and recruitment, we can help. Call us on +44 (0)20 3457 0894 or email Cathryn.edmondson@innecto.com
