Food for thought: becoming an employer of choice
Once you have good people and people with potential in your workforce, you want to keep and develop them.
Engaged and motivated team members enjoy their jobs, do them well and look forward to turning up every day. In turn, this drives productivity, better products or services, and innovation.
It is a win-win situation but of course it needs a bit of time, thought and effort on the part of the employer.
Good employers attract good people.
So where do you start in your journey to becoming an employer of choice?
Here are some key points to consider. By their very nature, some of these overlap but they should give you food for thought:
create a positive workplace culture
engage with employees
demonstrate a commitment to equal opportunity and social responsibility
offer attractive benefits and opportunities
foster a good work-life balance
Workplace culture
The really hard one here is culture, because it’s not something you can get “off the shelf”. But it’s important.
Organisations with a positive culture who value their workforce and provide a great place to work have much better retention rates - including where jobs are low skilled and tasks are repetitive.
Creating a positive workplace culture that fosters collaboration, innovation and employee development is critical. This can be achieved by regularly communicating your business’s vision and values, recognising and rewarding employee achievements, and promoting open communication and transparency.
Each business’s individual route will be different, but here’s the story of a how a Hebridean distillery went about laying the foundations for a positive workplace culture.
Employee engagement
Engaged employees are more productive, creative and loyal.
You can engage with employees by promoting open communication, providing opportunities for feedback, and creating a sense of community through team-building activities. These can take a whole range of forms, from social events to community projects.
Give employees a voice - people are more likely to show commitment to your business if their views are listened to and valued.
In addition, you have to be clear about the behaviours and values you want in your business, and ensure your managers model them. Model them yourself too - give recognition and praise where you can, and constructive feedback when it’s needed.
Castleton Farm knew they wanted to start a two-way process in how they spoke with their workforce and introduced the “Castleton Code”. Read more about how they did it here.
Equal opportunity and social responsibility
Embracing diversity and inclusion can attract a wider pool of talent and foster a more inclusive workplace culture. People are now looking at work and the role they want it to play in their lives in a different way and working in jobs that better align with their new values.
Fair Work aims to balance the rights and responsibilities of employers and workers. These principles offer a valuable model for food and drink, helping you retain people at all levels of the business.
You can find out more about Fair Work here.
A pillar of Fair Work involves committing to the real Living Wage and making sure that zero hours contracts are not used inappropriately. Lanarkshire-based food ingredient manufacturer R&W Scott has gone one further, as one of Scotland’s first Living Hours employers.
You can also hear them tell the story in their own voice in this Flexibility Works video.
Attractive benefits and opportunities
These don’t always have to be financial and should certainly include training, mentorship and professional development. Remember that
If your business carries out work with a technological or innovative angle, think about asking your team to become STEM ambassadors. By interacting with young people, your business and your people can gain new ideas and insight. It also raises the business profile.
But it is also a really good way to develop and motivate existing staff.
Find out more about STEM Ambassadors in Scotland here.
Work-life balance
Employees value a healthy work-life balance. A report from Aviva in September last year found that two fifths (41%) of employees were attracted to their current role because of the work-life balance – which is five percentage points higher than those who cited salary.
Don’t take is as an excuse to pay lower wages (we’re pretty sure it doesn’t work like that) but it does show that money isn’t everything.
You could provide flexible work arrangements, such as flexible schedules and job sharing, to help employees balance work and personal responsibilities.
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has some useful resources on the topic to help you and these are listed at the end of this article.
Take the test
Let’s see how you measure up so far. Here’s a checklist to help you assess whether you’re doing enough to retain good people.
Some recommendations
Develop your managers so they motivate and develop your people (see resources in the next section for more tips)
Offer a breadth of experience within a role, with exposure to different parts of the business, e.g. through cross-team collaboration or secondments
Provide clear development pathways and career options. Ambitious, capable people will look for career development opportunities beyond just the next role. Young people, in particular, will want to know what the possibilities are
Offer flexible working arrangements and opportunities for remote working where possible (see the CIPD resources in the next section)
Find your local DYW and sign up to the Young Person’s Guarantee – introducing young people to your business helps the existing team, gaining new ideas and insight from a generationally diverse team
Case studies
Want some more examples of how businesses are taking a variety of approaches to retaining their team?
There’s a shortage of skills in the food & drink industry and nowhere is this more evident than in butchery. Hugh Black and Sons is taking a versatile approach to recruiting and retaining its workforce.
And keeping traditional skills alive plays an important part in our food & drink industry. James McLaren has made the Forfar bridie in the Angus town for 130 years: find out how they manage their skills.
Other resources
The CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) has an employee turnover and retention factsheet, as well as one on employee engagement.
They also have information on flexible and hybrid working practices, as well as reports on that subject and a handy set of Q&As.Fair Work: as well as this introduction to Fair Work, there is an employer support tool and these individual case studies from the Food & Drink Federation Scotland
STEM Ambassadors: you can find out more on this here.
Get involved in Developing the Young Workforce and think about signing up to the Young Person’s Guarantee
Develop your managers with workshops on being an exceptional leader
And of course there is the Scotland Food & Drink Partnership’s recruitment and retention toolkit, along with all the rest of the resources on Feeding Workforce Skills