Business Incorporation

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Many small businesses struggle to hire top notch employees as well as retain them. There are a number of areas where they believe they are at a disadvantage compared to larger businesses.

These concerns include: 1) Lack of career growth possibilities, 2) Employee Pay, 3) Employee Benefits and 4) An unstructured environment. I would like to address all of these potential shortfalls and how they can be turned into a positive for both attracting as well as keeping the best employees.

1. The lack of career growth possibilities – A small business can have and show opportunities for career growth. While they do have a flatter organization, the potential for growth does exist for employees to pick up other skills when they help the owner and other employees with all the tasks and responsibilities that must be fulfilled. For example, they may help with advertising copy but be mostly a sales person. They can actively assist with other things such as inventory. Additionally a small business can divide itself by either business units or by disciplines. Either way, if employees have clearly defined areas of responsibility they can grow by learning and having responsibility for a number of different areas. In a simplistic example, it would be something like earning merit badges for the different areas of responsibility. Explaining how someone that grows within your organization will be building both broad and deep experiences that look great on a resume can be a real plus to many small business employees with the desire to grow. Many people who work in large companies do only one job for their entire career. These employees hit a ceiling in both pay and experience early and cease to grow past that point. This is something a small business owner needs to be sure and point out.

2. Employee compensation – While compensation is important, I believe its ability to retain top employees is much overrated. A small business doesn’t want to be too far away from what a larger firm might offer but more importantly, you want to reward employees with recognition in a number of ways. For example you might include, bonuses based on quantifiable results, extra time off, special perks like attending sporting events and in particular, recognition of performance for others in the business to take note of. This will not only help with the rising stars but it helps build healthy employee within the organization.

3. Employee Benefits – While employee benefits can include a lot of items, the main benefit that most concerns existing as well as potential employees is business health insurance. What a lot of small businesses do not know is that with sufficient up front planning, setup and management, the premiums of small business health insurance can be very reasonable. {A couple of other ways to keep this cost under control is employee incentives and employee contributions.|For example, two ways to manage the cost of this benefit is through incentives and employee contributions.}

4. An unstructured environment – Rather than allow a normally less structured environment in a small business to be viewed as a negative, present this as a positive. Here are two examples of ways to present a less structured business environment to prospective employees, a) A business environment which allows the flexibility to take on projects and acquire new skills that would not occur within a large company and b) Wearing various hats can position someone better for the owner’s job or to own and run their own business eventually.

When a small business owner takes all of these often perceived negatives and turns them into positives, the business owner will end up, not only with better employee hiring and retention, but also have a more successful business. This is all great for the business owner and their enterprise.

Small Business Advice employee retention, retaining small business employees, Small Business