Cracking the Code of Company Culture: 4 Signs Your Employer Brand is Damaged

Are you constantly battling with a revolving door of employees and anemic hiring pools? In this episode I pull back the curtain to reveal the subtle, yet detrimental signs of a faltering company culture and its dire effects on your business's appeal to potential talent. A strong employer brand isn't just about attracting top-notch candidates—it's about keeping them. 

This episode zeroes in on the tell-tale symptoms of a cultural crisis, from the sting of high turnover to the frustration of a dwindling applicant stream, and the hidden costs that can bleed your business dry. It's time for a crucial reality check to redirect your ship away from the iceberg of cultural decay.

Next week, we'll keep the momentum with Claire Chandler of Talent Boost, who will shed light on rejuvenating a withered work environment. But for now, I'm laying out a lifeline for small businesses: our signature Hiring and Retention Blueprint. Imagine having streamlined hiring processes, from pinpointing the ideal job criteria to implementing onboarding systems that stick. Envision cultivating a workplace where coaching, feedback, and clear expectations are the norm, not the exception, and where employees aren't just present—they're engaged and invested. 

If you're ready to transform your HR framework and empower your team's potential, this conversation is the hammer to break the glass ceiling of retention woes.

As a business coach, there are 6 critical mistakes that I see founders and business owners make.

If you nod in agonized agreement to the points below, you’re in a prison cell that many entrepreneurs the world over find themselves in:

• Working endless hours without scaling new heights...
• Working harder to make even less...
• Lying awake, agonizing about your superior competitors...
• Spending more time doused in frustration than sipping the champagne of success...
• Always on the hunt for fresh strategies and new customers...
• Drowning in staff issues when you’d rather focus on business growth…

To help you overcome these 6 critical mistakes, I have written the Six Silver Bullets e-book to guide you through the process. Implementing these Six Silver Bullets are Six Surprisingly Simple and Effective Strategies Smart Entrepreneurs Use to Gain Control of Their Time, Team, and Money and Grow Their Business Profits Fast!

This eBook isn’t just another business manual. It’s your ticket to scaling peaks you’ve only dreamt of. Implementing these strategies isn't optional—it’s a must.

Download your FREE copy today!

https://hub.scaleocityworks.com/ebook

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome to the Entrepreneur to Employer Podcast. I am your host, brian Montez, founder of Scalosity Works and the Entrepreneur to Employer Coaching and Membership Community. So congratulations as an order. If you've built a successful freelance business that has grown to the point where you need to hire, you have achieved a huge milestone. If you've already passed the point of making your first hire and your team is now growing well, congratulations is an order to you as well. So, regardless of where you are with scaling your team and your business, whether you're at employee number one or employee number 100, this podcast focuses on everything related to people operations. We'll cover best practices, strategies and solutions to help you build a sustainable and scalable business that is fueled by great people and a great culture. So if you're enjoying listening to this Entrepreneur to Employer Podcast, please subscribe, give us a like and give us a review. Your feedback will help us grow this podcast and we'll be able to positively impact more employers to help them build better work environments. Welcome back to another episode of the Entrepreneur to Employer Podcast. I am your host, brian Montez, and founder of Scalosity Works. So today I want to talk about how you can determine, or what signs and symptoms there are to tell you that your culture is broken, that your organizational culture is just not working, and this is important because a lot of business owners don't focus on culture because they feel they can't measure it or they can't tie it to the bottom line or they can't tie it to profitability. And in reality, you actually can, and so I'm going to talk today about four symptoms that will happen in your business. That should be a red flag to you to say hey, I've got issues within my organization that I need to start addressing, and part of the reason why I am talking about this today is because next week, on the podcast, I'm going to have an amazing guest by the name of Claire Chandler. Her firm is called Talent Boost and she's actually going to get into all these topics in more detail, and she held organizations, deal with the talent issues that are associated with broken cultures and things that need to improve so that you can grow your business without losing your talent. So let's get into it.

Speaker 1: 2:12

Talk about the four signs and symptoms that you need to be looking for, that are going to be red flags and that are going to tell you that your organizational culture is going in the wrong direction. All of it focuses around what we call employer brand. Right. You have to remember that as your business grows, your business itself creates a brand. People are looking at you as an employer and the brand that goes with it, meaning that they're deciding do I want to go work for this company? Do I want to go work for these people? Do I want to work for those leaders? Right, when you are going through the process of recruiting or you're building your talent pipeline, people are looking at the organization long before you ever talk to them. They're looking on glass door to see are there any reviews out there? Right, have any other employees put some bad stuff about this company? They're looking on Indeed right. There are so many places online for employees to talk about their employers and if everything out there comes back negative about the organization, then you're going to start having problems because your employer brand is going to be considered damaged. So the four signs and symptoms that you need to be looking for that will give you some insight as to whether or not your employer brand and your culture are broken are the following First, what we call a low attraction rate right.

Speaker 1: 3:32

Many, many hiring managers and business owners are saying we can't find good talent out there. Nobody wants to work. This generation that, this generation this and the reality is that's just absolutely not true. There's a lot of great people out there that want to work and it doesn't matter. There's people in all generations that want to work and people in all generations that don't want to work, so you cannot lump them all into the same pool. So when we say, as a business owner, I can't find anybody good to come work for me, well, you know, chances are it has something to do with either your job posting, your employer brand, your hiring process. You need to take a step back and before you just blanket blame the world that nobody wants to work, you need to really start assessing whether or not your employer brand and your organization is someplace where people actually want to work.

Speaker 1: 4:23

So low attraction is one sign and symptom of that. If you put job postings out there and people aren't applying, that's a low attraction rate, right. If you're not getting people coming and saying, hey, I'm interested in the job, and you're only getting a few applicants, if that, that low attraction rate, is a sign Something is going on, right. Do I have negative comments out there about our workplace, on Indeed or on Glassdoor Right? You need to start figuring out why do I have a low attraction rate? Is my job posting written poorly? Is my job posting scaring people off Right? Or is my compensation package off Right? You need to take a step back before blaming the world and take a hard look at what you can control and see what you can do to fix the low attraction rate when you go out to recruit.

Speaker 1: 5:12

The second sign and symptom that your employer brand could be damaged is going to be a high turnover rate. When you have employees that are quitting at a high pace, that is considered a high turnover rate. Currently, there are metrics and there's benchmarks and there's ways that we track this. Right, and it should be a data plate. That's in your HR statistics and it actually should be part of what you look at in your financials. Right, because high turnover has a cost to the business. Every time an employee leaves, if you're not prepared for that departure, you have to go out and recruit a new person. You have to spend time and money to recruit. You have to onboard, you have to train. There's ramp up time. There's stress on the other employees that have to carry some of the duties. You may have issues with clients because that employee is left Right. There are hard costs and soft costs associated with high turnover and if your employees are going out the door faster than you can hire them, that high turnover is going to harm your business and it's going to harm the reputation of your business. If people are quitting at a regular pace, that news is going to get out there right. Future employees are going to know that people don't stick around there very long and they're going to start asking why Future employees are just going to post it on Indeed or Glassdoor and they're going to talk about the negative experience they had and why they're leaving. So it's very important that you focus on the employee experience to help improve and reduce high turnover and improve retention. So high turnover is definitely a sign and symptom that something is wrong with your employer brand and your culture.

Speaker 1: 6:45

The third component that comes up a lot of people refer to it as engagement, employee engagement and I don't know that I necessarily agree with that terminology because, at the end of the day, we as humans are not designed to be engaged 100% of the time. It's just that's not how we're wired. We need certain breaks throughout the day. There's time throughout the day where we probably need to take a step back and just stare off into space and think right, this whole mindset that we're productive 24-7 really is a flawed mindset. So employee engagement is about is my team hitting their milestones? Are they hitting their deadlines? Are we delivering work on time?

Speaker 1: 7:22

You're looking for some of those measureables in your business to determine whether or not your team is productive successfully. Now, it doesn't mean productive every hour that they're at work, but they are hitting the expectations that are set. Are they getting everything out in time? They're not missing deadlines? The quality of work is at expected or higher? Those are the things you want to be looking for, and if that's not happening, then, yeah, you do have a low employee engagement. They're disconnected, they're doing the bare minimum, and you will need to start figuring out why is that? Is it the employee? Is it the workplace? Is it our culture? Is it the employee experience or is it a combination of everything? There are sometimes employees just check out and there's nothing that you as the owner, business owner leader, can do about it, and those are the conversations we have to have with those particular employees. There are other times where engagement is low and it's on us, as the business owner, to change the environment, to improve the environment so that engagement goes up. So you really will need to take a hard look at why is your engagement down? What are the measurable things? What's telling you that engagement is down? What are the things you can measure and what do we need to do to fix it?

Speaker 1: 8:32

The fourth red flag, or sign-in symptom that your employee brand is damaged or that you also have a broken culture. It's gonna be what we call a low fill rate. Right, so you go to make a job offer and they decline right at. This fill rate is a metric that we track when we're recruiting. Right, we want to know that we make the job offer and we're able to, you know, get that candidate on board as an employee. If they Don't sign on, then our fill rate goes down and that's a problem.

Speaker 1: 9:00

Right, if we have a low fill rate, if you're extending job offers and More than not those job offers are turned down, then chances are there's a problem with your employer brand or your company culture, or both. Right, because they really do overlap. So a low fill rate in other words, you getting rejected, the business getting rejected when you extend job offers is a problem. Now, if it happens once in a while, it does happen. Somebody gets competing job offer. It's a little bit better. It does happen occasionally, but if it is happening to the business regularly and you have a really low fill rate, that is a red flag that you need to take a look at what's going on in the business and why are we not filling these jobs? All right, so the four red flags that you need to be looking for to determine if you to start to realize that you might have a broken culture or and a broken or a negatively impacted employer brand right, low Traction rate when you go out to recruit, you're just not getting applicants. You have a high turnover rate of employees are going out the door faster than you can keep them. You have a low engagement rate, meaning that productivity is down, deadlines are missed, quality of work is off or low Right, some of those are some of the facts you can look for it with a low engagement. And then, fourth, a low fill rate. You go to extend job offers and people are declining those job offers. So if we have one, two, three or all four of these, it's definitely time for you to take a step back and start reflecting on the business and seeing what you need to do to take Control of the culture, take control of your employer brand and start to fix that.

Speaker 1: 10:35

Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the option to employer podcast. We made this a real quick one for you, with some actionable steps for you to take with your business tomorrow. And if you're wondering how you can work with us at Scalosity Works, there are two ways that you can work with us. Number one if you are looking to get some HR support, we do have the proactive HR program where we will support your business from an HR business partner perspective, remotely. So we can certainly help you with HR as your business grows.

Speaker 1: 11:00

So our proactive HR program is one way that you can work with us.

Speaker 1: 11:04

And the second way you can work with us would be through one Of our coaching programs.

Speaker 1: 11:08

We have a hiring and retention Blueprint for small businesses.

Speaker 1: 11:13

It is a cohort type coaching program where we work with you to help you build your Hiring processes, starting with your assessment for the job itself, creating your job posting, how to do your internal job descriptions, how to structure your hiring and interviewing processes and how to streamline those how to standardize the interview process itself.

Speaker 1: 11:31

We work with you on how to create your onboarding program for success. And we work with you on some retention strategies, such as implementing coaching plus feedback, as well as developing your one-to-one schedules with your employees and Creating that environment of coaching and feedback and expectation alignment so that you can hopefully boost the retention and Give them a reason to stay in your organization longer. So two ways you can work with us we can help you with our proactive HR solution and we can also work with you on a coaching level to help you build your hiring and Retention systems for your employees and your team. So any of those sell good. You feel free to reach out to me at Brian Emmett's Galasty works, calm and, and all that information will be in the show notes for you as well, and we look forward to working with you. And that concludes this podcast, to this week's podcast. Have a great week and we will see you next week on the odd career to a lawyer podcast.