Lately, all anyone can talk about is our current labor shortage and how to address it. 10 Tips to Keep Your New Hires, 5 Reasons Your Employees Are Leaving, so on and so forth. None of these conversations are bad, of course, but they aren’t always productive—and sometimes they miss the point altogether. It’s easy to get caught up in gimmicks rather than true substance. While initiatives like employee-of-the-month, free food, or recreation spaces might be well-intended, they usually don’t bring lasting change, and they often aren’t what existing and potential employees want to see.
In order to build a truly engaged workforce filled with a diversity of experience and perspective, it’s crucial that you first understand your why before you take any other steps. If you aren’t confident in your mission, if you can’t really articulate why your company exists, it’s going to be very obvious, and it’s going to be harder to develop initiatives that are actually in line with your company culture and values.
Recently, Beck Technology’s president Stewart Carroll joined the Deliberate Words podcast to share how the company’s mission guides them in everything we do and lays the groundwork for the strong, vibrant culture we have today.
Why Do You Need to Know Your Why?
Before we dive in, it's important to address the obvious—why do companies need to understand their why in order to hire a passionate workforce full of a variety of perspectives? The first answer is that it's going to be difficult for your company to push initiatives that are actually meaningful to the people who work for you if you don't have any kind of mission or culture to guide those initiatives. Just because everyone else is doing something doesn't mean you should do it. It might end up feeling hollow, or not addressing the needs of your team, because it doesn't align with your values. But when you don't have any idea what your values are, you aren't going to be able to know what alignment really looks like.
Second, people are going to spend the majority of their lives at work. They don't want that time to be spent for a soulless automaton—they want to know that what they're doing truly has meaning and purpose. Studies have found that mission-driven workers are 54% more likely to stay at a company for five years, and that companies who are high in trust are also high in performance.
Finally, not having a firm grasp of your company's purpose can actually significantly impact your financial growth as well. An article from finance expert Toptal mentions that "when effectively channeled, great missions have the power to drive sales far beyond what a given company's product, service, or profile might initially suggest."
What is Beck Technology’s Why?
Beck Technology's mission is to revolutionize the industry and create the future, and we make sure to hire people who are just excited about that as we are.
Our company was founded with the intention to “change the industry and revolutionize the future,” and we continue to work by that principle today. We’re not interested in just making a quick buck—we genuinely hope that our technological innovations and advancements help the construction industry as a whole and change things permanently for the better with each new product or update that we release. On top of that, we have three core values that guide our culture both internally and externally: Passion, Innovation, and Caring, also known as PIC. We do our best to make sure that every action we take—whether it’s as simple as sending an email or as complicated as closing a deal—is imbued with at least one, if not all, of these values.
Stewart says, “For us, it’s making the world a better place through better preconstruction decisions. Everybody lives in a building, works in a building, is touched by real estate . . . it touches everybody on the planet. And our goal is to help make those projects better. And then we go into our core values, passion, innovation and caring—and they’re not just words, they’re actions. Every quarter, we’re adjusting our objectives to make sure we’re hitting our yearly plan. We’re very deliberate about communicating and aligning our core values with how we operate our business.”
How Does Understanding Our Mission Help Beck Technology to Hire Diverse, Passionate People?
Thanks to our defined mission and guiding values, we’re able to set parameters in place that help us connect with like-minded individuals. One example? “[Upholding our values] starts in the recruiting process,” says Stewart. “We try to find as many opportunities as possible to be inclusive, to challenge ourselves so that we’re not hiring carbon copies of ourselves. There’s a lot of effort that goes in pre-hiring. We use something called Predictive Index as part of our hiring process to understand how people are naturally wired, and it’s a great tool for setting up roles for success and making sure the candidate’s natural strengths are lined up with the role’s requirements. And then it’s making sure they have the heart, which is those core behaviors that make them a really good fit at Beck Technology.”
Since we have such a strong understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish as a company, we’re able to have a much clearer picture of the type of people we want to work with and what those people would need to see in our company to work with us. From there, we ensure that we’re always making employee satisfaction and retention top priority by incorporating it into our yearly plan and quarterly objectives. Some of these objectives include receiving a certain percentage on quarterly employee surveys and taking steps toward maintaining a diverse and inclusive workplace, like requiring managers to take continuing education and hosting monthly conversations about the different ways that diversity and inclusion appear at Beck Technology. All of these initiatives are going to go a lot farther towards addressing retention and labor shortage than quick, flashy “fixes” will.
Beck Technology People Resource Leader Donna Williamson adds, "Knowing, understanding, and aligning with our why is so important to the growth of our staff here at Beck Tech. We are looking for those teammates that not only share our core values of passion, innovation, and caring, but those that are a culture add. Bring your true selves to work each day—your best selves! We are a company that empowers our team to thrive by sharing our ideas, encouraging all voices at the table. It has given us amazing opportunities—allowing us to be humble, listen, and use our mission to foster the growth and development of our company and our team."
Want To Know More?
We hope that this high-level overview about knowing your mission before you focus on recruitment tactics will help you understand how to invest in strategies that will actually solve the problems you’re facing instead of just offering you some temporary duct-tape. But if you’re ready to hear more, click here to hear the rest of Stewart’s interview with Deliberate Words.
