I have often wondered what results I would get if I carried out a Mystery Shopper exercise (pretending to be a client) and asking your employees whether they think your organization would win the Employer of choice award in the whole country. What do you think your employees would say about you, your organization, management style, corporate culture, your compensation and reward structure and your systems in general? Perhaps I must start by explaining what I mean when I say an ‘employer of choice’. An employer of choice is simply an organization that every job seeker would like to work for because the job seeker believes that the organization looks after its employees better than other organizations.

These are organization where people are willing to work for many years not because they cannot find anywhere else to go but they are so content with their employer that they would rather remain loyal as that particular employer looks after them well. As a Human Resource Consultancy we carry out recruitment and selection on behalf of organizations, when it comes to placement of Executive professionals we prefer to headhunt, it is more effective and more targeted. In many cases we always ask the potential employer the names of companies that they feel the person they are looking for must have worked for. That list of companies tell us that the named companies have what people perceive to be best practice work culture, that employees who have worked there are good performers and more often than not potential employers are willing to pay whatever the executive wants because the employer knows that they will get an excellent return on their investments. I worked for an employer of choice early in my work career and I was told when I joined the organization that once I work for them I will never struggle to find employment with their company name on my CV. They were right, I didn’t struggle, once I started looking for work many companies were keen to talk to me because I had worked for ‘an employer of choice’.

There is no rocket science in becoming an employer of choice, whilst I agree that people are complex and it can be difficult to understand what it is that people look for when they are identifying an employer of choice. There are a number of questions that you must ask yourself in order to figure out whether your organizations falls in the category of employers of choice. Do you know if your employees enjoy working for you? please note that the fact that your workers turn up for work every day on time does not mean that they like or enjoy working for you. Your workers must get to a point where they are so engaged in their work that they never notice that it is lunch time or time to go home, but when they start packing their bags at 15:30 and yet they finish work at 17:00, then you must know that you have a problem on your hands and that your employee are probably using your organization as a stepping stone. How do you find out if your employees enjoy working for you, carry out an employee opinion survey with the use of an external consultant that is the only way that your staff will open up and speak freely about your organization.

Ask yourself if your employees ‘full potential is being realized, one of the many frustrations that employees face at work is when their potential is not realized and not recognized. An employer of choice makes an effort through the establishment of a performance management system to understand each and every member of staff, what they can and cannot do and how the employer can fix what can be fixed. The employee feels wanted, developmental plans are put in place and the employee begins to see a long term positive relationship with their employer. Do you know whether your employees are planning to stay within your organization? Have you ever conducted a trend analysis to see the average time that people stay within your organization, if you have not I suggest you do something about it. Do you have a communication system that is transparent and open, are your staff proactive in their approach to their work, does team spirit thrive amongst your employees, and do you encourage teamwork by leading by example? One of the areas that many organizations failure to put any level of importance to is creating a good balance for employees between work and home life. Even as organizations chase profits, it is important to realize that an unbalanced employee will not be proactive. I have witnessed situations where a newlywed young man just two weeks into his marriage is informed that he has to move to Solwezi and that there is only single accommodation available meaning that he is not able to move with his wife. Do you honestly expect super performance from this particular employee? What you will get is the same employee starting to buy the newspaper everyday so that he can see the new vacancies, apply and get back to Lusaka to save his marriage. An employer of choice strives to ensure that they create a balance between what they expect of their employees and what the families of their employees expect from them. Are your managers respected for their leadership and management styles? Most importantly ask yourself whether your employees would recommend your company to their friends as a good place to work?

As we move into 2010 I want to share with you a word that most of you have heard, seen, read but may have never taken any interest to find out what it means. That word is UBUNTU, I encourage organizations not only to know what this word means but to practice UBUNTU remember that what makes us human is the very humanity that we show to each other. UBUNTU means ‘kindness, understanding, compassion, tolerance, empathy, caring, sharing, sensitivity and respect. When you are giving of yourself and being compassionate, you stop seeing yourself or your organization as the center of the universe’. Whilst we focus on profits and business growth, let us not forget the very people that make our organizations move and grow, let us remember to practice UBUNTU. I want to take this opportunity to wish you all a prosperous 2010.