1. Cultivate your employer brand and company culture
Developing your employer brand and company culture is the best way to attract and retain new talent. The employer brand is the image you project, your reputation.
According to a study conducted by La Super Agence, a good employer brand can help companies reach 50% of truly qualified candidates, while a bad reputation is a deterrent for about 33% of candidates.
It’s a fact: today’s candidates prefer companies whose values are in line with their own. Offering an attractive salary is no longer enough. In the La Super Agence study, the figures are clear:
- 88% of young employees need to be in tune with the company culture;
- 67% of candidates are willing to accept a lower salary if the company has a good image on the net.
The objective for your company? Focus your actions on developing your employer brand and your company culture. Don’t forget to focus on both aspects: online image and offline image. You have many resources at your disposal: social networks, your website, blogs, events…
2. Make work meaningful again
For today’s workers, and even more so for the new generation of employees (the so-called Gen Zs), companies are not just places where they perform an automated and pigeon-holed role, with the sole purpose of getting a salary at the end of the month. We often talk about the “why generation”: candidates are above all looking for a company that helps them to find meaning and that supports them throughout their career.
Companies need to adapt to these new requirements by offering diversified training and projects, by encouraging career development, and by creating bridges between different departments. This will give you a better chance of attracting young (and not so young) candidates and keeping them from moving on to other companies.
3. Focus on flexibility
Since the health crisis, teleworking has become widespread. In the past, teleworking didn’t really get a good press within companies. Most managers were reluctant to grant teleworking hours to their employees. Today, the trend has been reversed! Teleworking has become a new way of working, valued by a majority of French employees. A 2021 study by the Opinion Way Institute revealed that 38% of employees are ready to leave a company if it does not offer teleworking.
Teleworking helps to improve employees’ work/life balance, to reduce fatigue, and to save time, for example by avoiding travel time between home and work.
Not sure how to implement teleworking in your company? Start slowly, by offering your employees one teleworking day per week. Don’t worry, teleworking doesn’t reduce their productivity!
You can also offer flexible hours: employees don’t all have the same rhythm, some prefer to start work earlier, while the night owls can stay longer at the end of the day.
4. Offer employee benefits
As you probably know, benefits are a way to attract new talent and retain your employees. The goal is to differentiate yourself from other companies and from your competitors. Lunch vouchers and parking spaces might have been enough a few years ago, but today’s young talents expect more benefits from their company. You can offer health benefits, support for employees with children, and ways to balance work and personal life. For example, offer advantageous health insurance contracts with broad coverage (because employees all have health insurance plans these days and you need to stand out!) and childcare solutions. These benefits are particularly appreciated by employees.
5. Improve the Quality of Life and Working Conditions
You’ve probably often heard about QWL, Quality of Work Life? Now in France, we talk about Quality of Life and Working Conditions (the French Labor Code changed the term on March 31, 2022). This change of expression makes sense: by introducing the notion of “working conditions”, the objective is to focus on several interrelated aspects of working life: the work itself, the conditions in which it is performed, the means used to ensure that it is done well, the team and company environment, and the organizational framework.
The Labor Code has therefore changed from QWL to Quality of Life and Working Conditions, because previously, companies essentially developed solutions for the well-being of their employees, such as yoga classes or after-work events, but without focusing on the underlying problems of company life.
How can you improve the Quality of Life and Working Conditions in your company?
- Allow employees to disconnect (e.g., no emails or phone calls outside of working hours);
- Focus on participative management;
- Foster team solidarity;
- Develop internal cohesion;
- Employ useful tools: software that makes work easier and administrative software that simplifies the management of day-to-day tasks, such as leave and absence management software.
For example, by using leave and absence management software, employees can send their leave requests in a few clicks, and managers or HR can validate them quickly. The leave and absence request process is simplified and the company becomes more transparent and efficient.
Keeple leave and absence management software is a useful solution for improving your company’s Quality of Life and Working Conditions, helping you to attract and retain new talent. Far from being a mere detail, the process for requesting leave is often time-consuming in companies. With Keeple, employees can access their leave balance in real time and can send their requests completely autonomously, while the HR department also saves time and increases its productivity.
Do you have a project? A question? Don’t hesitate to contact us!
