November 2024
This article was featured in our October 2024 edition of WorkLife Business News which you can read here.
Infinity Group were accredited as a 2024 Sunday Times Best Places to Work (medium organisation). Entries for the 2025 Sunday Times Best Places to Work are now live and close on 31st March 2025.
Written by: Louise Otton, Head of Talent Development and Culture at Infinity Group.
As businesses across industries continue to undergo digital transformation, migrating to the cloud and building out roadmaps that seek to harness the latest technology, there’s a key consideration that cannot be forgotten: talent. Business leaders who understand this are well-placed to build teams that enable their organisations to reach business goals. To do so requires an authentic investment in people, their progression, wellbeing and happiness.
To help with this, here’s my five tips for attracting and retaining talent.
1. Let your values be your guide
Every organisation has business goals and needs a talent pool that is both capable and motivated in order to achieve these. Ultimately, a business is only as purpose-led as its employees, so it’s essential to ensure that everyone understands how what they do aligns to the company’s values and mission. And values can’t just be words on a wall. They must resonate with the reality and culture of the workplace.
A significant element of creating an empowered and motivated workforce is trust, particularly in a world in which hybrid work is the norm. Giving employees autonomy and showing that you respect them enough to do their jobs effectively without constant check-ins, meetings and micromanagement is crucial. Remember that you hired someone competent to do the job competently.
Of course, it’s important to keep an even-handed approach and not be too hands-off either. New starters and younger employees particularly benefit from facetime with more experienced colleagues, so ensuring a cadence of contact is crucial. As businesses grow and operate hybrid models, it’s important to keep regular touchpoints in the diary. Running virtual team meetings, giving different teams and departments the opportunity to provide key updates and report on their success is a really important part of maintaining culture.
2. Invest and measure
The importance of fostering culture is something many businesses espouse, yet neglect to measure. There are many technology solutions that can help with this, enabling employees to give feedback anonymously or otherwise, as well as allowing businesses to measure employee engagement. It’s also important that there is an open culture in which employees feel comfortable sharing their concerns and challenges directly with managers and HR for more immediate support.
As an executive coach by trade, I believe strongly in empowering employees to take control of their own career progression, rather than simply following pre-determined rungs on the career ladder before them.
Collaboratively creating pathways that build on the unique skillsets and ambitions of employees is the most effective means of doing this. Mentoring should also happen at all levels of the business, from management to senior leadership. This ensures a virtuous chain of investment in talent and learning and development from top to bottom. And when it comes to the very top, i.e. the executive team, coaches from outside the organisation can be brought in to continue skills development, such as public speaking, soft skills and strategy.
3. Reward success
To strengthen the motivation for fostering culture, it’s important to recognise those who embody it. At Infinity Group, we have a quarterly Values Award Programme that recognises employees who demonstrate our values through positive behaviours. We also hold an annual conference and awards night to celebrate and recognise our people, which includes 17 categories of awards which are entirely peer-led, with employees submitting their nominations via our internal feedback platform.
It doesn’t have to be the exact same mechanism, but finding a way to incentivise alignment with your organisation’s values is key. Public call-outs and kudos on team calls, company town halls and business-wide comms are all effective mediums for recognising individual excellence—but ensuring this recognition is, at least in part, driven by peers adds an element of authenticity.
4. Don’t just manage people, engage and support them
At Infinity Group, we have split our people management function into three centres of excellence, including talent acquisition, human resources, and talent development. This ensures each element is given the investment it requires to deliver quality outcomes.
For us, it’s really important that employees are recruited not only on the basis of their talent, but also their values. Our recruiters know our business and live and breathe our culture, which ensures that each new hire truly aligns with Infinity Group’s ethos. As a result, people tend to stay with us when we hire them, as evidenced by our high retention rate which averages around 90%.
We want to make sure that we’re not just agile operationally, we also focus on adapting to feedback we get from our employees through weekly feedback reports. If we notice common trends, we build in new processes and work hard at showing that action is being taken. Through this proactive approach, we have been able to maintain an average annual employee net promoter score (eNPS) of 40.
5. Adapt to retain
From a talent acquisition perspective, hiring processes should be inclusive and always strive to bring in people from different backgrounds. Multiple studies have proven that diverse teams lead to better outcomes, as more diverse experiences and thought processes are applied to problems.
In the world of tech, we have seen great strides for better representation of women, and Infinity Group is now at 30% representation, which is higher than the industry average, with a significant number in management and leadership roles.
It’s also essential to build in an understanding that people’s lives and circumstances can change. Neurodiverse employees or those with disabilities will likely experience fluctuations in their conditions that require more flexible working arrangements. Of course, neurotypical employees are also likely to experience periods of personal difficulty, which require a similar level of support. This is where human resources must step in to ensure that unique situations are dealt with empathetically and that the right support is made available. The value this provides employees cannot be understated.
Authenticity and mutual respect are crucial. Employees communicate with and form close bonds with their peers. If one is underserved by the organisation not living up to the standards it expects of its employees, culture will suffer and engagement and loyalty will falter—a fate that will surely be avoided if the above five points are followed.
This article was featured in our October 2024 edition of WorkLife Business News which you can read here.
