Embracing Change: Hiring and Retaining Great Employees

Creating an experience today has become an integral component of success for pest management businesses from both the consumer and employee perspectives. With that in mind, the ability to hire and retain the best talent takes much more nowadays than offering the best pay. Developing, and in some cases changing, your company’s culture can immediately make an impact on the success rate of landing the best employees. A great culture will help elevate the employee experience.

What is culture? For businesses, the technical term would be organizational culture. Organizational culture can be defined as the values, beliefs, and ways of interacting that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of the organization.

Culture Building Blocks

In service-based industries such as pest control and lawn care, the ability to hire and retain top talent is essential for current and long-term success because people are the foundation of the business. A winning culture will help a business hire and retain employees much easier. Whether you are just starting to build a culture or need to make a major culture change, putting a plan together utilizing change management will help facilitate this process. 

Once a culture problem has been identified, the first step to being able to create a winning culture would be to define core values. Does your company value integrity, professionalism, and providing a job that can provide a great living? The values of a company will be the building blocks of culture and will help influence employee’s attitudes.

Once the core values of your business are determined, you must figure out now how you are going to execute on this. Are you going to foster employee appreciation by doing quarterly events such as a fishing trip, terminate problematic employees, or are you going to be more transparent with company goals? These are all great ways to establish a culture that will be attractive to current and future employees, but you will need to develop these to be in line with your core values. A great way to map out what to do with your business would be to survey your employees.

Developing a culture should be a fun endeavor and implementation should be rolled out strategically. Most importantly, after shifts in culture are made, staying the course and following through will be critical to your new culture flourishing. Lastly, another key consideration is if there are multiple branches within your organization. If managers of different branches have their own culture it can be detrimental to a company’s growth. As with any major transition, making these changes will be hard, but always remember that there is a direct correlation between having a great culture and employee retention.

Turning a Job into a Career

The ability to transform a job into a career is another crucial aspect of being able to hire and retain great employees. As I mentioned earlier in this article, it is not enough today to only offer the highest salary. There are many other benefits that are sought out by technicians within the pest and lawn care industries. Competitive wages are always a good place to start with an incentive package. Next, the other benefits that I see technicians being attracted to are health benefits, retirement benefits, flexible hours, and work life balance. Sometimes, these benefits will be more important to an employee and higher paying jobs will be turned down.
Another way of creating a career path in the pest and lawn industries is providing the ability for employees to advance within the company. For employees to advance without looking for a new job, the company must be growing. In order to prepare current employees for newly created roles, providing access to continuing education such as management courses should be provided at no cost. Investing in your current employees will more often prove to be much cheaper than going out and hiring a new employee and training them. An outside hire may end up not being a good fit with the culture.
As our industries become increasingly sophisticated, companies must be willing to change to help hire and retain employees. Developing your own unique culture and creating career paths for your employees will help grow the business as well as reduce headaches that surround the hiring process.

Are you interested in developing your business’s culture and being able to create a high value proposition to prospective employees?

Contact PCO Bookkeepers to learn more about our CFO services, which allow us to dive much deeper into your business and help make the necessary changes to vault your business to the next level.