Attracting, Motivating and Retaining Employees in a Booming Economy

As the economy heats up, businesses are growing and being pushed to the limit as far as their people bandwidth. With a 3.5% unemployment rate, maintaining a reliable and motivated team is essential in a booming economy, people are the greatest asset a business has.

As a small business, you have a disadvantage over larger businesses when it comes to attracting, motivating and retaining top talent to support your growth. Larger businesses can afford top tier benefits, pay their employees more and offer perks, stability and flexibility smaller businesses may not be able to match. All is not lost! You can build a solid offering to attract and retain the best, but you must have a plan. Here are 3 creative ways to make it happen:

 Create and Define a Strong Culture

Small businesses have this one advantage, they can be far more creative with regards to establishing a workplace culture. Can you define yours? Are you able to implement flexible work hours, staff luncheons, more autonomy with regards to responsibilities or any other elements that make your business a great place to work? Culture is sometimes more important than money or benefits, think of ways you can brighten up your workplace and make it a great place to work.

 Performance Based Pay Incentives

So maybe you’re not Amazon where their minimum wage is $15, or Tesla, where just working there could set you up for a skyrocket future career. But you can create an awesome culture when you tie individual or group performance to the success of the business and share a portion of revenue increases with your team. With performance-based pay, you are not tied to perpetually higher labor costs, and you only pay out when the company does well. You win, they win, we all win.

 Supplemental Benefits

Face it, medical benefits are expensive these days, and many small businesses cannot afford to offer a full complement of health insurance or other medical benefits. However, there are several ways to offer supplemental benefits that are affordable and, in some cases, fully voluntary. Consider benefits like Group Life, Dental and Vision.

 Supplemental benefits can be offered for less than $100 per month per employee are provided through companies like Aflac, Principal, Colonial and Allstate. Another good option is a 401k plan. 401k’s can be setup for less than $2000 a year and can be used to share profit without the extra labor burden on top of pay. Infinium offers a solid retirement solution through Transamerica that starts at $1000 per year.

 As you can see, there are affordable ways to take care of your employees, so they will take care of your business. In this tight labor market, employees have options, because there are far more openings than people out there, so be aware of that as you grow. Growth without good people is difficult!

 Infinium can offer you guidance, administration or trusted partners to help you establish a practical employee attraction and retention program. Contact the Small business HR experts at info@infiniumhr.com