8 steps to become Best Employer

There are many ways, but these are worth looking into:




The first step on any journey is to seek to understand where your organisation currently stands. Having line of sight of your organisation’s current standing in the minds of your employees is crucial in determining what your current strengths and opportunities are.

1 DIAGNOSE

Diagnosis can be in the form of employee surveys and focus groups ideally in collaboration with a neutral party to ensure confidentiality of employee responses.

2 PLAN

Based on feedback collected during diagnosis, develop a plan to achieve your organisation’s goals. Taking the time to articulate where you want to be, and how your organisation will get there keeps the organisation and HR focused on strategic vision and tactical initiatives.

3 ENROL

Build a business case to obtain buy-in from the organisation’s management team and subsequently, work to enrol the broader employee population. In best employer organisations, people practices are never solely HR’s job – but rather, every manager’s responsibility.

4 BENCHMARK

Once all plans have been set in motion and the organisation is feeling the impact and improvements, it would be a good time to take stock of the level of improvement. Benchmarking against the industry you operate in, or participating in studies that seek to identify best employers are a great avenue to see how well your organisation is doing in terms of engaging your employees and measuring consistency and improvement over time.

5 REFINE/REFOCUS

All organisations are unique in their own way – and any plan/initiative could always be reviewed and refined to better suit the changing needs of the organisation. There should not be hesitation to refocus efforts if a plan clearly does not work.

6 MEASURE

Measures of success not only provide an indication of how effective a plan or initiative is, they also help justify a business case for sustaining successful plans and programmes. Measuring the success of any plan/initiative would provide valuable insight into how you would like to proceed, by refining, refocusing or maintaining status quo.

7 PILOT

Some people programmes/initiatives which impact the entire organisation may be a leap of faith. Instead of launching immediately, a pilot programme on a smaller employee group can be considered to assess effectiveness.

8 EXECUTE, EXECUTE, EXECUTE

There is no single magical recipe to being a best employer. Getting there is actually as much about innovative people programmes, as about getting the basics (e.g. total rewards, performance management, talent development, career management, managerial effectiveness) executed flawlessly. More often than not organisations get caught up with new ideas and lose sight of the fundamentals of execution via people managers.