STAFF RETENTION
PART 1
Five strategies that create a culture of happy employees.
BY MEGAN LANGER, CO-FOUNDER, THE FLYBOOK
Hiring and retaining staff have always been challeng - es for aerial adventure operators, but never more so than now—and the numbers prove it. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there has been roughly one unemployed (i.e., available) worker for every two job openings in the U.S. since late 2021. A decade ago, the ratio was roughly three unemployed workers for every job opening. Hiring and retaining staff has been the top concern for aerial adventure operators in the Adventure Park Insider “State of the Industry Report” for six of the last seven years. The fierce competition for staff requires more time, energy, and money than ever before. Competitive compensation is critical to employee recruitment and retention, of course. We’ll cover that in part two of this series in the Summer issue of API. Here, we discuss how company culture can help attract and retain talent. WHAT IS CULTURE? In a survey from Monster, 74 percent of Gen Z respondents ranked purpose and culture as more important than a pay - check at work. Culture is an organization’s DNA. It is the shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that characterize a workplace. When leaders are intentional about establishing values, and revisit them daily, it affects people’s behavior and shapes their work experience. Clear expectations around trust, time, flexibility, and innovation all contribute to a company’s culture. A great company culture impacts everything, including employee happiness, employee retention, and company performance. At the 2023 ACCT conference, The Flybook reservation soft - ware hosted a workshop on this topic with Go Ape HR and organizational excellence manager Jack Marti, and Zebulon Smith, founder and CEO of consulting firm Zebulon LLC. Here are five actionable strategies from that session that can help create a culture of happy employees.
1. Write your mission and vision statements and define company values.
According to experts at Harvard Business Review , as a rule of thumb, mission and vision statements should be one sentence each and easy enough to remember that people can repeat them. They don’t need to be incredibly original, but should be authentic and distinct enough that they can be used to hold team members accountable. Mission: What is the core purpose of our work together? Why do we exist and do what we do? This is the north star around which company cultures are built, the single thing a person can point to as their reason for working in the organization.
Vision: What are we hoping to achieve together? This should be a bold but achievable long-term vision for the company.
Values: How do we do what we do? What principles will we consistently abide by? These should be impactful phrases that drive an organization’s day-to-day operations. They will help set expectations for behavior, performance, and how people treat each other. Defining company values is no easy task, but there is nothing more important for a company to do. Here’s an example of what that process may look like: 1. Have senior leaders engage a broad group of employees in focus groups to discuss employee beliefs about what is important to the company. Document the feedback. 2. Choose the top 10 words or phrases that resonate with your company, then separate them into groups based on common themes. 3. From each group, pick one you would never compromise on. 4. From this smaller list, choose three to five values that you would fight for, hire and fire people for, and take or decline business deals for. Once values are defined, the real difference lies in how they are used on a regular basis. continued >>
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