An Employment Agency Perspective
Today, Broadwing believes in fostering a Culture First company that looks after its employees in order to increase recruiter performance. We have built a diverse, multicultural, and multidisciplinary team through a flat-based office structure, allowing entrepreneurship, building relationships, sharing experiences, and learning from one another in an ever-changing landscape.
Below, I reveal some of the main areas currently covered to increase employee performance.
Employee Compensation
In an effort to retain talent and help workers cope with rising inflation, we plan to nearly double our budget for employee salaries and structure the amount of commission compensation for all workers. Changes will go into effect later this year and will mainly affect early to mid-level employees.
Our organisation’s readiness to spend more on employees follows similar moves by our key clients and industry shifts. We have seen organisations in Malta, launch new cash reward plans that allow employees to receive significantly larger bonuses and profit sharing. Other companies have more than doubled the maximum base salary for their corporate workers.
All this reveals a trend among companies investing more in providing a rewarding experience for their employees. All of which set a good foundation for better ideas and a more productive company.
Diversity & Inclusion (Collective Working)
Cross-pollination of ideas is a must and although we’re experiencing notable growth, our team is small enough that everyone has a voice and input on everything, even if it’s not part of their core responsibility or strength. Historically, as companies have grown, they lose the diversity of ideas, fresh perspectives and innovation that can come from transparent communication, so for us, it’s important that encouraging a collaborative environment remains engrained in our company culture.
Success in recruitment is all about leads: knowing where the leads are coming from, where to find them, and how to keep them. When you have multiple recruitment consultants looking for leads, your team will be more likely to find ones that convert into a successful placement.
Our team is built on trust, strong team spirit and a feeling of togetherness. We believe in sharing leads, software, marketing collateral, and other resources that can be challenging to acquire alone. Our commission split structure introduced earlier last year, has enhanced collaboration and at the same time reward our employees when working together as a team, even when at times a team member might fall into a difficult month. We have seen this help improve effective communication between team members, increase motivation as well as results.
“We always have people cheering and motivating one another – and vice versa. We’re all working towards a common goal, and support from the team is priceless.”
Talent Assessment
Powered by 60+ years of behavioural science, cutting-edge software, and professional consulting from the world’s top workplace behaviour specialists, The Predictive Index empowers companies around the globe to overcome their greatest workplace challenges. We are in a good position to predict job success and improve employee performance by utilising talent development assessments.
Last month we had the opportunity to conduct an internal PI Behavioural Assessment, providing a clear picture of how we work and how we can collaborate best with one another. As a result, I grew a deeper understanding of my strengths and blind spots to inspire a high-performing team by simply understanding who is working with who, increasing self-awareness, identifying areas for improvement, and building stronger relationships with one another.
Reward Management
As benefits and incentives go, rewarding employees is one of the best, most effective ways to boost retention and employee satisfaction.
Our recruiters are the main frontliners in driving sales to the company. The implementation of strategies and bonus policies to help reward everyone in the organisation, in a fair and consistent way, has helped our team feel valued and more motivated – From simply a Birthday gift to a more complex reward strategy, this has overall improved the productivity and success of the business.
While most companies offer a bonus structure at the end of the year, we offer individual and team, quarterly reward strategies to give employees opportunities to enhance themselves – bringing about a mutually beneficial way of recognising good workers, and key performers.
Team-Building Activities
COVID had a huge impact on the mental health of employees: loneliness rates have skyrocketed; people were longing for the office to reconnect with colleagues again. Getting out and taking part in physical activities, is one of the many great ways we took advantage of to help with reducing stress and anxiety.
Overall, the greatest advantage of team building is that it makes your team more effective, promotes inclusion, facilitates faster adaptation of new team members, as well as getting to know colleagues not just on a professional level but on a personal level, and as a result, makes staff much more productive in the workplace.
This means that teams are productive while maintaining good communication and developing healthy relationships with each other. It’s a combination of “getting the job done” and trust. Nevertheless, introducing a structure for team-building events where the amount spent per person on activities can change depending on sales generated by the previous quarter has also given flexibility and a broader variety of options, as well as extra motivation among employees.
Work-life Balance & Wellbeing
Work-life balance and wellbeing have increased in importance notably since 2015, with 53% of employees citing them as “very important” compared with 61% of today’s workforce.
Many other workplace studies from the past year highlight just how burned out, overwhelmed, and stressed out the workforce is at large, resulting in lower productivity and a high level of anxiety, causing workers to miss deadlines, quotas, or complete tasks at an unacceptably slow rate.
Even for workers who aren’t experiencing burnout, the significant increase in work-life balance and remote work has raised awareness about the value of job flexibility options – options that are largely here to stay. With recent Forbes data revealing that 97% of employees don’t want to return to the office full-time, many experts believe these new requirements will cost non-adaptive companies a chunk of their employees who are willing to walk away for greater work flexibility.
Charity begins at home…
We are taking work-life balance and the well-being of our employees very seriously. Our responsibility is to ensure that our colleagues and friends have the appropriate space and environment that promotes success and a healthy work-life balance.
Offering a state-of-the-art office with ample outdoor space and gym facilities within the building – We encourage our co-workers to take time out during the day and reflect. We have introduced flexible working hours and a hybrid work model that supports a blend of in-office, remote, and on-the-go workers.
Join Our Award-Winning Team
Broadwing's expert-driven service would hold its own against a nationally saturated market, being the leader in Malta offering complete recruitment solutions and a favourite among job seekers, through the constant drive for excellence.
Flexibility
Most of our employees are foreign nationals, and as a result, we are now in discussion to implement the possibility for employees to travel abroad and work remotely for a number of weeks per annum – on special request. The work and travel program will help our team travel to meet family members and relatives for a longer period of time, all the while having the freedom to make their own schedule and work at their own pace towards our targets, increasing productivity, engagement, loyalty, and overall happiness within the company.
Reviews (Performance & Progress)
In thriving cultures, people who are under-performing are helped, coached, and given feedback. As a team-leader I stand to help my colleagues find the right role, understand their struggles, as well as be aware of how they are feeling. People in the wrong roles can be some of the best staff you have in your business if you can be compassionate enough to give them a second chance in a different role. For example, applying for a recruitment administration position, however, thriving when listening and talking to people.
“The appreciation that comes from being helped converts into long-term loyalty that rebuilds careers and becomes the basis of a thriving culture.”
Once a month and on every quarter, we are setting aside time to bring our organisation together and fill everyone in on what’s going on. We are allowing employees to submit questions beforehand, converse in one-to-one meetings and identify what gaps in information need to be addressed.
Personal Development
On a professional level, we advocate for continuous professional and personal development through upskilling and reskilling; we offer ECDL courses and learning business English, which may be booked in groups, mini-groups or in individual lessons with a private tutor, to name a few.
We inspire our employees to instigate a growth mindset and help co-workers believe that their capabilities can, in fact, be enhanced, as opposed to being static and unchangeable.
Team Training
If you’re a new recruitment consultant, being a member of our team can be invaluable because you don’t have to figure the industry out on your own. All our recruitment consultants receive excellent and ongoing training enabling them to reach their full potential, by learning the ins and outs of recruitment from people with local and international experience.
We reach out to role models in respective industries, to motivate and coach our team in the skills they need, inspire them, and prove to them that a career in the recruitment sector will help change the world for the better. We have done this on several occasions, including sessions within the sales, finance, and technology sectors.
Transparency
In the world of work, business decisions have long been made in the boardrooms behind closed doors, with the logic for such decisions rarely, if ever, disclosed. However, times are changing, and that practice isn’t really working anymore. According to Slack’s Future of Work study, 80% of today’s workers want insights into how decisions are made at their organisation, and 87% of job applicants want transparency in their future workplace.
According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, workplace transparency is beneficial to the work experience of both employees and employers. In addition to unifying team goals, transparency can improve morale and engagement, reduce job-related stress, boost productivity, and increase revenue. It costs nothing, so our ROI is bound to be high.
Transparency must start at the top – as a team leader, I need to lead by example. Employees will look to me for guidance on how to be transparent, so it’s essential to practice what we preach.
Our employees have a clear understanding of the bigger picture, including all the costs, relevant financial information, threats, opportunities, future plans, and direction of the company. Our Annual General Meetings, give all the team members the opportunity to weigh in before decisions are taken, and understand the company’s position better, as well as work together to improve performance.
Even when we don’t have all the answers, we encourage to share what we do know. If strategies are changing, we inform our team and be open about why. When challenges arise, we loop our employees in, and let them help identify creative solutions. We ignite our creativity when it comes to internal processes and entrepreneurial methodology by questioning ‘the norm’ and constantly optimising our processes to ensure that we’re running at optimum efficiency, even if this means going against the grain and disrupting industry processes. Ultimately, transparency comes down to meaningful, regular communication.
Conclusion
Company cultures cause share prices to increase or plummet. Instead of looking at spreadsheets and accountants for answers, we look at our people. Our people are what cause profits to go up or down. We identify the problems of our company’s culture, own them, and then become obsessed with asking our employees how we can make better changes. Then, we implement the changes. We increase recruiter performance by making our company transform into being Culture First. It starts with people.