Employer Branding Strategy - Why Self Actualization and Purpose matter

Struggling with finding good workforce for your team? Fighting a constant struggle to retain those you have? Try looking beyond what you can do with money and bonus packages. Think away from increasing car allowances or annual leave days. There is more to work these days. If you run a business or a team, read this article and find out how to achieve employee retention and hiring of talented staff with little investment in a short matter of time. 

The Employee Today is Different
In the past there must have been an entirely different type of employee wandering the job market. They desired to be payed high above all, wanted to work as little as possible and did not care about much beyond that. At least that is what it seems like when you look at how companies try to convince people to join them. Or make people stay with them. I have no idea what was relevant in that past, but I do see what is relevant now. And salary combined with fixed work-hours per week are not doing the trick anymore. I guess we all know that deep within ourselves. 

Now, at least I have seen many companies struggling to keep up with what the potential employee is looking for in a company beyond just a good salary. So that's what this blogs about: how do you retain and attract employees effectively without just throwing money at them? The answer is obviously somewhere between health, culture, motivation, engagement and employer branding. For shaping my thoughts into a proper format I was looking for a model, a half-scientific foundation for my proposed solution. And I think the following fits best, given my non-HR background: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. 


Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
For those of you that have not heard of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs before, here is a tiny summary of what it is and does: 

"Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation". Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, some of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans. Maslow used the terms "physiological", "safety", "belongingness" and "love", "esteem", "self-actualization" to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through."

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, taken from a random Google picture search - adjusted colors

This pyramid made me think about (and I guess I am not the first one here, to be clear) how this maybe translates into the workplace. Especially with a look at employee wellbeing, staff retention, talent recruiting and employer branding you can probably draw a connection. One could of course discuss the psychological details here and argue for days about if or if not something translates exactly into category A or B. But I guess my general idea is not far off from whatever experts might find true. 

The key is the simplification of obviously complex workplace and staff management topics into high level agenda points like “Good People Managers” or “Active Works Council”. Both examples can be utterly complicated topics in themselves already, so let's keep it simple. We are translating the hierarchy of needs into the workplace setting. Be open for that little step in mind and just take it, it will clarify further down this text. 

The Pyramid - Upside Down

So there are studies among the young workforce today, the Gen Y employees, across the whole world. Especially in that demographic group studies find one thing: the desire to find a purposeful job. It still matters to be paid well, to be employed long term. But other things matter as well. And they matter a lot. Here is what I have concluded from reading many articles about this over the last months: 

"Employee Hierarchy of Needs" in Generation Y, self crafted (no, there are no real statistics for this behind) 

The above depicts that there are many things that matter to especially younger workforce today when looking for a job. And that Salary, permanent contracts and the likes are just one of many pieces of the puzzle. They are the foundation, the basis. But not nearly the entirety anymore. We can see that emotional or psychological topics like trust among team members, the chance to personally improve or the possibility to actually pursue your own dreams in the form of self actualisation matter a lot to employees today. What you can read a lot about as well that apparently makes a great job these days: having a “purpose”. Having a purposeful job, doing something meaningful, is what matters to younger people more than ever. 

Great Value for little Money

The next graphic below - in simple examples – outlines the second reason why the workplace pyramid is upside down. The higher the cost of what you can do to keep or attract talent, the smaller the actual value of your action. Good companies with great brands win with the top 3 levels, not the lower two. 

Employee hierarchy of needs, looking at the number and variety of strings the HR, well being management and employer branding teams can pull to improve

Especially a pay rise, higher bonuses or blunt retention payments are used in emergency situations to retain the key persona of a company. That of course is only required because you failed in implementing the three top layers of the pyramid. With a great work culture and the chance to actually work for a purpose, few of those emergencies would ever occur. And be sure, they will come back asking for more pay in a few months time as their actual frustration does not come from salary at all. In short, it's not just about the cost of a retention / attraction strategy you pick - but also the sustainability of each item within that strategy. How long will a pay rise make one happy? How long until they come back for more? 

The Hierarchy of Needs for the 21st Century Workplace The below - final - pyramid follows logically in line with the above conclusions, looking at the ROI per item on your strategy and it's sustainability. Your goal must be to do good things and get good things back (employee engagement, purposeful work), not to give and get nothing in return (pay rise). Example: implement a public blogging and social media usage culture. Employee engagement grows, social media attention for your business will grow and people will view your company as a great place to work for in a few months. At almost zero cost. 

Upside Down Pyramid compared with Maslow's terms of Needs looking at ROI and Sustainability

If you just throw money at people to make them stay, they might stay for some time. And there are times when you either do or they leave, no matter how much they love the team and the company. Yet, just raising the pay is not going to last long. That is all I am saying. 

Understood? Time to act!

Having learned about a sustainable and financially viable way to form an employer branding and staff retention / attraction strategy you should now start to act. Start to imagine for YOUR company and team what a properly orchestrated combination of all the above ideas could look like. Many companies are hiring wellbeing managers. You could start to improve by offering leadership training. Look at implementing recurring team events. Foster internal exchange and engagement in social / community work. Especially the latter touches the final and most valuable item: a purpose at work. 

Having a purposeful job is THE asset people look for in life today. But only a few organisations have a business objective that allows to see any purpose beyond making profit. This is in the nature of things in capitalism. In other words: not everyone can work for Greenpeace. To address this it makes no sense to try and suggest to be proud of software production, car manufacturing, clothing design or IT consulting. So I guess what you can do here instead of making up purposes for your staff that you don't believe in either: offer your staff a chance to do pro-bono work, sponsored by your company. Start looking at social responsibility engagements – and I don’t mean: donate money to some foundation. I mean: let your employees work on social projects in the community, within your company. This, if allowed to be done during work-time, will remove many of the concerns about not doing something purposeful right away. The effort is comparably small, the value can be enormous.

General Best Practice - A Closing Word 
Before I let you go, just walk through the below and keep them in mind when designing and implementing your staff retention and attraction strategy: 

• Prioritise your strategy components clearly and publicly. Stick to it. 
• Re-Evaluate the success and value of every component / initiative. Measure it. 
• Allow for feedback in order to be able to evaluate and improve. 
• Don't over commit because trust is gained hard and lost easily. 
• Mind the outside and let it in, it's a dangerous mistake to stay in the ivory tower. 
• Ask for help and don't re-invent the wheel - others have most likely done it before.
• Do good and speak about it ;) should be part of your strategy as a discrete item. 

I hope this article helps to understand the value of employee wellbeing and to offer self actualisation time and programs. If you agree, share and tweet this. If you don't, please let me know why and I am happy to hear other thoughts as well.