With more and more people leaving their jobs to join “the Great Resignation,” countless small business owners find themselves questioning whether they can do anything to prevent their employees from doing the same. Fortunately, the answer is a resounding “yes.” In this episode, Jon Aidukonis and Gene Marks, along with Chelsey Paulson, Chief Strategy Officer of Keystone Group International, discuss how small business owners can utilize cultural strategies to not only retain their current employees, but also recruit new talent.

Podcast Key Highlights

• The Defining Elements of Your Small Business’s Culture
  • Leaders lay the foundation for a business’s culture since every decision they make can have a tremendous impact on their employees.
  • Purpose is another pivotal component of your small business’s culture because it establishes both you and your staff’s mutual goals.
  • Your business culture is also defined by its values and how it strives to serve its clients.
  • Lastly, communication plays an important role in your business’s culture since it determines how you and your employees interact with each other.
• Strategies for Recruiting and Retaining Talent
  • As the owner of a small business, you need to honestly evaluate your leadership skills and try to fill in any potential gaps, so that you can be someone who your staff respects.
  • Asking your employees for their input on important business matters gives them an opportunity to utilize their skills and makes them feel valued.
  • You should actively be seeking out potential employees who can help grow and contribute to your small business’s culture rather than someone who merely fits a specific mold.
• Qualities to Look for in a Potential Employee
  • Resiliency
  • Growth mindset
• The Benefits of Offering an ESOP (Employees Stock Ownership
  Plans)
  • ESOPs are one way for small business owners to show that they deeply believe in their employees.
  • ESOPs serve as a great succession plan since anyone who’s considering taking over the business will already have a significant investment in it.
  • Because of the level of transparency you’ll need to maintain with your employees, having an ESOP ensures that your staff has a deeper understanding of your financial operations.
• The Disadvantages of Offering an ESOP
  • ESOPs can be more expensive due to yearly valuations.
  • There are tax filings associated with ESOPs and if an
    employee resigns, you are required to buy out their shares.

Links

• Keystone Group International
• The ESOP Association

Transcript

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Jon: Hello, everyone. And welcome back to another episode of Small Biz Ahead, the small business podcast presented by The Hartford. This is Jon Aidukonis, and I am joined by my co-host Gene Marks. Gene, how are you doing?

Gene: Jon, not that great actually. I rolled my ankle playing squash the other day and people can’t see me, but I’ve got an ankle brace, which I’m going to put on as you guys are talking. It blew up like the size of a baseball. But I didn’t break anything. But anyway, no, not that great. I’m getting better, but not that great. Let’s leave it at that. You have your conversation with Chelsey.

Jon: Well, we’re here to focus on the future, I guess. We are joined today by Chelsey Paulson. Chelsey is with a company called Keystone Group International. She is the chief strategy officer there, and she’s here today to talk to us a little bit about how to think of a cultural strategy so you can retain talent during the great resignation. So Chelsey, how are you?

Chelsey: I am doing better than Gene, I guess. I have no injuries to complain about. So I’m doing well.

Gene: Yeah. Just be careful out there, Chelsey, all right?

Chelsey: I will.

Gene: Remember the squash and the skiing.

Jon: Chelsey, and you’re based in Minnesota?

Chelsey: I am, yes.

Jon: Yeah. So you’re having a good week. Twins have had a good weekend?

Chelsey: Yeah. Twins. We got wild hockey that’s doing well. We’re not anticipating the football season coming up, but we’re doing okay right now. Timberwolves are doing well. So we’ve had some successes as of late.

Jon: There you go. Actually, I was able to catch the Red Sox and Twins came yesterday. And disappointing for a New Englander, but good if you are from the Minnesota side there. Awesome. Well, Chelsey, thanks so much for joining us. I’m excited to get into the conversation. So as you know and as all of our listeners and everyone probably in the world, the great resignation, I feel like is a new buzzword that is not going away.

Jon: A lot of conversation about, I think, what the future of work looks like, what expectations are from employees, what employers should do kind of under this lens of how COVID, I think, has impacted and probably safe to say accelerated a lot of things we’ve seen going on as managers of people and builders of businesses for a while.

Jon: So really keen on getting a little bit of your insight there. But maybe to start off, we can just talk a little bit about who you are and your background and what you guys do over at Keystone.

Chelsey: Sounds good. So my background is in human resources. So I have 15 years of HR experience. There was a lot of things I loved about HR and there was a lot of things I didn’t love about HR. What I did love was a cultural aspect, the leadership development aspect, connecting with people throughout the organization and helping them understand what it was that they wanted to be when they grew up and then helping them get there.

Chelsey: The other thing about my organization is that we were an employee-owned organization. So we had an awesome culture, and I got to really help enhance that and kind of drive that feeling in the organization. So I did that for many years. Loved it. Loved my company, but then just realized that there’s more that I wanted to be doing and more of an impact I felt like I could have around leadership and around culture.

Chelsey: And so I found Keystone Group a few years ago. And the whole focus at Keystone is really the intersection of human needs and business needs. And so what we do is we play right at the intersection of those and we really help leaders think about how do we think? How do we act? How do we interact in new ways so that we can scale our businesses in a way that’s fun, that’s engaging, where people want to show up to work.

Chelsey: They want to be here. And so it’s really focused on growth and scaling businesses, but in the right way. That’s focused on both what people need and what the business needs. And we feel that when you combine those two, that’s when you kind of see that rocket ship take off and, again, you have more fun while doing it. And growth doesn’t have to be painful.

Jon: Awesome. And I like how you articulate that too, especially kind of the notion of a cultural strategy because I think so often you hear people talk about culture as a piece of an HR strategy or a business strategy when kind of everything else is tied to the culture. So in my mind, everything else is a piece of that.

Jon: So interesting to see that people are starting to, I think, come around that a little bit. It feels like kind of the marketing renaissance of 10 years ago, where what does it mean to be a customer focused marketer? And what do people really want to hear? And how can you kind of add value back to their lives?

Chelsey: Absolutely. And I mean, people run our businesses. If we didn’t have people, we would be able to run our business. People are a part of your culture. So culture is everything. And I think we talked about COVID and that’s kind of done over the last couple of years. And what I feel it’s done is it’s revealed everything. There’s no hiding anymore of what’s working and what’s not working.

Chelsey: What’s not working is out for everyone in the open right now. And it’s actually accelerated our business because people are saying, oh, culture is important. We thought we had a good culture, but now over COVID, we realize we don’t. It’s like, well, no, actually your culture wasn’t that great before COVID. COVID just revealed it and made it become of a lot more apparent to every person and every leader in the company.

Jon: So maybe we go there because I think a lot of times, people think about culture or cultural perks as workplace perks like the beer fountains, the kombucha on tap, ping pong breaks, nap pods. I don’t know that was ever fully the right answer, but I think more so when we talk about now a more distributed workforce or workforce that’s virtual, you kind of have to think culture