Employee engagement: a key tool to grow your business

It is clear from our own experience of placing thousands of individuals into jobs with hundreds of organisations, that employee engagement has a major influence on business success. Today, the challenge is twofold:

Attracting the right people:

• UK unemployment rates are at lowest since 1975 at 4%
• UK workforce is shrinking at the same time as vacancies are rising
• Job seekers are becoming more discerning and engage with employer ‘brands’

Retaining and engaging the right people:

• Today’s work force is more fluid and more likely to ‘job hop’ to build their career portfolio
• Almost three quarters (73%) of millennials agreed they would be more motivated to work if it was recognised by personalised benefits in addition to salary – the same goes for 65% of Gen X and 57% of baby boomers.

Why does engagement matter?

 It is a well established fact that engaged employees drive more business growth. Companies with strong employee engagement rates experience 87% higher staff retention, 17% higher productivity levels, 20% higher sales and 19% increase in revenue.

Engagement goes way beyond a casual dress code. Companies gaining recognition as Best Places to Work For are working hard on many levels to engage their people. According to the Sunday Times Best Small Companies to work, the right things to on focus are:

• Personal growth
• Giving something back
• Remuneration & Reward
• Leadership
• Benefits
• Wellbeing

 How First Base helps SME’s with engagement

For SME’s, the challenges of engaging and retaining talent can be exacerbated by limited resources, cost pressures, competition and lack of specific knowledge of HR and legal matters. Offering a package of perks, particularly to part time and temporray staff, can be a challenge.

To help our SME clients, First Base took a cold hard look at what is working regarding employee engagement around the world and came across a model that has been successful in the US for over 25 years.

The PEO (Professional Employment Organisation) model, which has recently been adapted to UK needs by our payroll partner, Hive360, is based on  ‘co-employment’ and group buying power. In America, where 3.4mi workers are employed through this model, companies using PEO grow up to 9% faster, have up to 14% less staff turnover, are 50% less likely to go out of business and reduce admin costs significantly per employee.

Through our partnership with Hive 360, we offer our temporary staff a pay & perks portal which gives them access to services such as 24h NHS approved telephone GP service, specialised phone counselling, health and wellbeing advice and thousands of shopping and lifestyle discounts. Through the portal they also receive payslips in a GDPR compliant way and be able to see their pensions performance in real time. This adds value to our relationship with temporary staff and in turn helps the employers we work with.

Employers and candidates tell us that First Base is their first choice for help with their recruitment requirements and their personal career progression. If you would like to know more about how the First Base team could help you, contact us on 01453 755330.

(This blog was adapted from an article provided by our payroll partner, Hive 360).