The corporate world has always been a stressful and competitive place, where individuals have had to work increasingly hard to maintain relevance and hold on to their positions. With the recent difficulties that have faced businesses as a result of the financial crisis, natural disasters, and a variety of other troubling events and circumstances, these typical stresses have become all the more problematic and made things all the more complicated for companies and their employees. Unfortunately under this additional strain employers have gone into overdrive working all the harder to ensure that their employees are at their very best and that their company is able to possess the very best talent, and while this may seem like a noble motive such a drive can bring to bear an unintended and uncomfortable strain on an organization’s employees.
These additional external stresses have understandably put new strain on companies’ executive search and hiring processes as well. In these efforts most employers have begun desperately seeking out new strategies and means by which to update and improve their hiring practices. However, if employers and managers would simply refocus their efforts slightly, turning their attention towards the development of effective employee retention strategies targeted both toward keeping their company’s current employees as satisfied and motivated as possible and using these efforts to attract new talent, companies can efficiently kill two birds with one stone and do so without the major investment of time and money that it would take to drastically overhaul certain aspects of their recruitment strategies.
One of the first things that employers will need to take into consideration in this matter is the state of mind of their employees. Just as companies and their leaders are being made to face an inordinate amount of stress as a result of recent events so too are those companies’ employees, to whom these burdens trickle down. Understandably when such pressures begin to weigh on these individuals a degree of fear will begin to set in; fear that their jobs and livelihoods now hang in the balance more so than ever, and that even the tiniest mistake could see them fired. Unfortunately such fear and the stress that accompanies it can often lead individuals to make the exact mistakes that they are so afraid of. Where some may hold the flawed belief that fear makes an excellent motivator, the truth of the matter is that more often than not it will make an individual jittery and weigh on their thoughts in a way that will over occupy their mind and leave room for errors to be made.
Given the talent shortage facing the job market now is not the time for companies to have to struggle through their executive search and hiring processes. So in order to make the best of this trying time in the corporate world employers must work to offset the fears of their employees and make their respective companies into an environment that is not only motivating but comforting as well. One enormous mistake that so many leaders make at such a time for example, even if certain cutbacks may be necessary, managers should never ever hang such facts over their employees as a threat of consequence for failure. On the contrary, managers should be working to assuage the fears of their employees and trying to put their minds at rest so that they will be able to focus more effectively on the work at hand.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
