Unleashing the full potential of your modern workforce: Tips to propel organizational success.

Published on September 18, 2023 | Webster Bank

In the dynamic workforce environment of recent years, businesses have successfully adapted to stay in lockstep with a changing market. As you evaluate what you can do today to secure a promising tomorrow, start your most valuable asset: your workforce. By adopting an inside-out approach to business growth, you can fortify your company from within and thrive in the modern workplace. Follow these tips to help achieve just that.

Make flexibility a superstrength.

Today, when remote work is standard practice, businesses understand the need to offer flexible work arrangements. Companies can tap into this self-awareness by empowering their team with choice. Offering a range of options empowers employees with choice and allows them to choose accommodations that enhance their performance, productivity, and engagement.

• Formalize flexibility. Incorporate employee choice into your company culture. Encourage adoption and ensure employees aren’t inadvertently penalized for exercising available options.
• Be agile. Don’t look at the changes as one and done. Keep the lines of communication open to see what’s working and what’s not and course correct as needed.
• Be open-minded. Question any long-held assumptions about how and where work should get done. Addressing the needs of your employees builds trust, engenders goodwill, boosts retention, and primes the talent pipeline.

Think beyond wages.

In recent years, a flusher job market enabled employees to come to know their worth—and advocate for compensation that reflects it. In recent months, employees enjoyed the fastest wage growth in two decades. Also, in an age of increasing transparency, colleagues are more apt to share and compare salary information with one another. This affords companies an opportunity to review their compensation practices, correct any inadvertent biases, and catalyze productive and open conversations with employees.

• Evaluate payroll structures. Assess and, if needed, recalibrate based on market analysis and internal review, to ensure pay scales are competitive, equitable, and free of bias.
• Be transparent about performance. Develop and document clear performance standards to communicate expectations, motivate employee development, incentivize growth, and create a mechanism to reward top performers for the value they provide the organization.
• Look outside the pay raise. Consider compensation tools including loyalty and performance bonuses, promotions, personal leave options, extended health benefits, and education and training reimbursement. Sponsored professional development not only provides employees opportunity for career growth, but specialized training focused on critical skills gaps can directly benefit your organization.

Refine your hiring focus.

After years of a hyper-competitive market, companies are taking a step back to re-evaluate their path forward, including hiring. A thoughtful audit may be overdue to understand what is working well and identify opportunities to address evolving business demands reshaping workforce needs.

• Take inventory. Conduct an analysis to identify and prioritize resource gaps and focus hiring efforts accordingly.
• Expand and diversify your talent pool. Widen your geographic search by offering remote work options, expanding your talent pool to a more diverse group of candidates, and crafting employee benefits packages that reflect company culture.
• Clarify your value proposition. Marketing goes beyond attracting customers. Evaluate how potential hires might perceive your business to ensure the right message is getting out to the right candidates.

It’s time to rewrite the script with meaningful, fundamental change. Implementing new working norms addresses the needs of today’s modern workforce and readies a company for the needs of tomorrow—and can be the difference between surviving and thriving.

Ready to take the next step?

Connect with Webster Bank today.