Benefits are a primary tool employers use to attract and retain employees. However, current legislation passing through congress may take some of that competitive advantage away. If this happens, what will employers do and how will they compete?
The first concern is health care reform
The various versions of the bills (as they are currently written) will mandate to some degree that all employers provide health insurance and dictates how much employers must contribute toward that health insurance. Another bill being considered is seven days of mandatory sick leave per year for all employees.
I’m not making a judgment about either of these bills, and we certainly don’t know what the final language will look like. I do think that employers should be considering what their compensation and benefit strategy will be if they lose the ability to use these benefits as recruiting and retention tools.
On first blush it would seem this would put more pressure on using wages to compete, likely resulting in bidding wars. So what other things can an employer use to gain competitive advantage with recruiting and retaining employees?
Reputation
The employer’s reputation is probably the biggest tool to consider. Reputations are rarely ever in sync with reality, and it takes a long time and a lot of effort to turn around a bad reputation. Boost your reputation by treating your employees, applicants and candidates better than the competition. Strive to become recognized as one of the best places to work.
Another opportunity to improve your competitiveness is to have career development plans for all employees, including a formal mentorship program.
Finally, something that is mandatory, especially for retention of employees, is the development of your supervisory/management team. Surveys continually indicate that one of the primary reasons employees’ leave an organization is because of their supervisor. So if we want to retain more employees, we need to get our supervisors and managers involved in the solution.
Summary
All of these would be good things to do regardless of what happens in congress with the mandating of benefits. These are also great strategies to employ if you are currently non-union and want to stay that way. Once the final version of the Employee Free Choice Act (otherwise known as the Card Check Act) passes, you can be assured there will a lot of union organizing activity. What is your strategy to deal with that?
