If you’ve gone to the effort of building a supportive, collaborative, happy, and productive workplace, you have every right to tell people about it. In fact, you’re obliged to.
Top talent is beginning to understand the importance of company culture. In some instances, it’s a greater factor in their career decision-making than salary. Just as 9 out of 10 people would take a pay cut if it meant that their work would be more meaningful, so too will a lot of talent prioritize working in a supportive, happy, and healthy environment over more traditional areas of focus like salary. This is more or less what the idea of employer branding is built upon.
Welcome to the third installment of our three-part series on how a modern staffing firm can build a strong company culture. In the first we worked to understand why staffing and recruiting organizations should look to develop a strong internal culture, and what such a culture looks like. In the second we moved onto the ‘how’, focusing on the four core tenets of company culture.
Having made it to the final stop on this journey, we’ll be working under the presumption that you’ve managed to create a strong and supportive company culture. All that’s left to do is to tell the world.
And as the beating heart of your company, who better to talk about you than the employees you so successfully support?
How evangelism strengthens company culture
Encouraging evangelism within your ranks isn’t about being boastful. Nor is it a test of employee loyalty. It’s a key part of strengthening your company culture, and the company as a whole.
Evangelism can only come when you nail company culture. But when done right, it creates a self-fulfilling talent cycle: you find great talent, you make them happy, you let them tell people how happy they are, you attract more great talent. Good people attract good people, so over time your company culture and organization as a whole will only get stronger.
Provided you’ve nailed the employee experience, employee advocacy tools like GaggleAMP, Sprout Social, and Oktopost make sharing those experiences easy and fun for your workers. These tools make it simple to share company posts through their own social media accounts, and gives employees control over the process: they can choose what to share, or create their own posts that you can check to ensure they’re within employer branding guidelines.
It must be stressed that evangelism relies on authenticity. It’s up to you to build a company culture so good that team members are excited to talk about it, in the same way that employees of kCura were excited to share their K Olympics exploits as outlined in part one. It’s so easy to tell when employee advocacy is forced or robotic, and by promising potential employees an experience that doesn’t exist, you consign yourself to high turnover, while actively damaging your employer brand.
Do evangelism well, however, and you’ll be able to capitalize on the most powerful recruiting tool available.
Technology makes cultural development easier
Throughout this series, we’ve regularly hit upon a common thread: technology. For every one of the core considerations of company culture – data and analysis, rewards and recognition, automation, health and wellness, and evangelism – there has been technology available to make life easy.
The upshot: in our modern world, a strong company culture is a tech-enabled culture, which:
- Has systems to track and act on team data and feedback.
- Has simple ways to recognize and reward team members.
- Uses automation to eliminate tedium, letting team members focus on the high-value and human things.
- Supports health and wellness (no matter your definition of those two terms.)
- Streamlines how team members can evangelize the company and draw in more talent.
The best thing with the tools that we have mentioned throughout is that as cloud-based solutions, they’re incredibly simple and cheap to implement. There’s nothing holding you back from using technology to enhance your company culture – you can start right now, no matter your resources.
Technology won’t replace the core human connectivity that a strong company culture is built upon. But it needs to enable that connectivity, particularly in our ever more isolated and virtual world. The good news is that it does exactly that, right now, and for the smallest of investments.
The only thing standing between you and an improved company culture is the will.
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