Wouldn’t it be nice to be labelled 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 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.

Choose 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 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 and 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 our employees;
• This might reduce turnover by 10%, which saves us thousands of dollars in hiring and training replacements;
• With those savings, we can implement new cross-functional training programs to make our employees more productive and versatile;
• This might further reduce turnover and limit our need to hire externally for senior roles

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

Hiring: The perfect first step

While any step towards cost-savings or better investments will kick-start the EIO cycle, one of the best places to start is recruiting. Getting the right people into the right roles solves more problems than any other employee-management activity, so as we look to build teams for the upcoming landscaping season, now is the perfect time to get started.

Before we start posting job ads, we have to figure out who we’re looking for. So, the first question we have to ask ourselves is: what does the right hire look like? Beyond their skills and requirements, what is their personality like? How are they motivated? What type of boss do they work best under? How will they get along with their colleagues?

Answering these questions is the first EIO decision we face: invest an hour of time now to profile the candidate we need; save a mountain of time and money later as we avoid friction and performance issues.

To make this step even more of a no-brainer, all Landscape Ontario members can take it with the help of EIO Experts—for free! One of your member benefits is a 1:1 EIO Health Check from EIO Solutions. In this 90-minute meeting,  you’ll be taken through a Leadership Team Behavioural Assessment that will give you an idea of the types of personalities you have in-house, so you get a better idea of who will fit in.

From there, EIO Solutions can remain hands-on throughout your hiring process. Their Right Hire Recruiting program will profile your ideal candidates for you, then create job postings, filter candidates using Predictive Success' Talent Optimization Platform, provide short-lists of who to interview along with interview guides, and create all onboarding documents for the new hire.

With the help of EIO’s 1:1 Health Check & Right Hire Recruiting, the odds of building a productive and dependable team skyrocket, reducing the need for mid-season re-hiring and re-training, and improving end-of-year turnover.

The cost savings (and avoided headaches) from that alone will be enough to start your transformation, so book your free 1:1 EIO Health Check to get started today.

Just visit eiosolutions.com/landscape-ontario.