Michael Hyatt:
Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

Michael Hyatt:
And this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work and succeed in life. And we want to talk about in this episode, how to hire great talent and how to retain it. And, Megan, that’s particularly important at this time when it’s really difficult to hire people and when it’s so competitive out there and people really do have options.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah.

Michael Hyatt:
So what is the secret to hiring great talent and retaining it?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, I think that people often focus on one or the other of these. They don’t think about how they go together. And I think battle number one is get the right people in the door and battle number two is create an environment that they want to stay in. And so I think that’s really what we’re going to be talking about today, is how do you find and attract the right people? And then how do you make them want to stay? How do you become the kind of organization that nobody ever wants to leave on the backside of that hire, both of which are critically important and have never been more challenging than they are in this market right now.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, I think it’s easy for business owners and leaders to think this is mostly about compensation. In other words, if we want to attract great talent, we got to be willing to pay for it, we got to step up to the plate, we got to pay above market if we’re going to get the right people. The problem with that is, if you do that, yes, you might attract the right people, or you might attract some people, but you may not retain them because there are some things that are more fundamental, some things that are more essential, than compensation. And I would start with having a purpose that people can align with, especially for younger generations, it’s really important that they can buy into your mission.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think this is so critical, and it’s one of the things that small businesses in particular often discount. And yet, this is one of the greatest differentiators and competitive advantages that you have as a small business, is that you can have a mission that people are attracted to, that they feel like gives them meaning and purpose. And one of the things we know on this side of COVID and really part of what’s happening with the Great Resignation is that people are evaluating how their professional choices align with their values at a different level than they ever have before.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And so what they want is they want to have congruity between their personal values, as well as their desire for meaning and contribution, with their place of employment. And so if you can be explicit about what your purpose is in the world, what your mission is, what your values are, what even your vision for the future is, then you’re going to have the opportunity to attract some of those people who might be otherwise swayed simply by compensation. They’re going to be swayed by something that’s deeper that you have to offer in your smaller organization.

Michael Hyatt:
And the reason that’s important is, because if the primary tool that you’re using to attract people to your company is money, they’re going to be people that are easily recruited to a better paying position. You’re not going to be able to retain those people. That’s why it’s got to be deeper than just the compensation. But to give you the idea of what a mission might sound like, because I know there are probably a lot of you that are listening to this that have heard a lot of talk about a mission statement and creating that, and is it just a general sense or does it need to be specific or whatever? I’ll tell you, this is something we have on our careers page, something that’s on our website in a number of places, because we do want to attract people that are like-minded, people that share the same purpose in the world, but here’s what we say in terms of our mission.

Michael Hyatt:
We say we are a performance-coaching company. We help high-achieving leaders and their teams get the vision, alignment, and execution they need to drive extraordinary results without compromising their most important values. Now, not everybody’s going to salute that. That’s not going to resonate with everybody. And that’s okay, because we want it to act like a filter. If somebody looks at that and goes, “Meh,” fine, you’re not somebody we want to recruit. But if that’s something that you read or hear and go, “Yeah, that really sounds interesting. That sounds like something I could get behind.” Those are the people that you’re trying to attract. So what I would say in terms of acquiring or finding the right people, put your mission front and center. Megan, do you want to say a word about core values, because I think those are important as well.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, absolutely. Again, people want to know if their personal values are going to be congruent with the values of the organization that they’re working for, they’re considering going to work for. There’s very little tolerance for there being incongruity between these two things anymore, especially as people are becoming more sophisticated in understanding how organizations work, their cynicism around organizations who maybe have a set of values that they don’t live by. So people are really looking for an organization that has a clear set of values and it walks its talk. Whatever you say is how you behave. People want to know, do you really behave in that way? And so we have eight core values that are posted on the wall in our office. We give awards for those every year in our annual team meeting, and we call them out as people are acting in alignment with them throughout the year.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And it really matters to our team. We’re really screening for these on the front end in our hiring process, because we want to know, are people going to be naturally aligned with our values? That’s not something, for example, unyielding integrity is one of our core values. If that’s not something that resonates with someone, if they’re kind of willing to do whatever it takes to succeed or succeed at all costs and at the expense of others or at the expense of their values, they’re not going to do well in our organization. We want to weed those people out on the front end. So I think this is a really important part of that kind of core ideology of your organization. This is why we teach this, by the way, to our coaching clients in our BusinessAccelerator coaching program.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
We teach how to write your mission for your company. How do you develop a set of core values? How do you develop a vision for the future? We want you to have these components in your business, not only because they act as really a compass or a rudder for the future, but also because they help you attract the right talent and then build and maintain a culture that keeps the right people in your organization for the long haul. It’s so critical, and very few places teach you how to do this. So we’ve really prioritized this in our coaching program for that reason.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay. So that’s basically the first tool in attracting and retaining top talent, is to make sure that your core ideology, your mission, your core values, even your vision, which we’re not going to talk about today, but it’s another important component of core ideology, but this is a major tool in recruiting the right people.

Michael Hyatt:
The second tool, I think, Megan, is culture. Having a world-class, healthy, enjoyable culture, a place where people look forward to going to work, where people are not dreading it, but they actually enjoy the people they work with and they feel like the culture somehow brings out the best in them, that we’re better together than we are individually. Now, if you’ve ever been in a toxic culture, there’s no repellent like a toxic culture. I think this is one of the primary reasons people leave companies, is because the culture becomes so abhorrent.

Michael Hyatt:
The problem is, that for most business leaders, culture is invisible. It’s just kind of the water that fish are swimming in. They’re unaware that there even is a culture. But there is a culture. There’s a way your organization makes decisions. There are certain things that your organization values. There are certain things that your organization punishes, other things that are rewarded. All of that together makes up your culture. And for somebody coming in from the outside, that’s kind of a palatable thing. They notice that they quickly become acclimated to it, and it either repels them or attracts them. So we’ve got to get this right. Do you have any thoughts on how to get the culture right, Megan?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, I think like a lot of things that we’ve been talking about lately on Lead to Win, this comes back to the idea of the Full Focus System: vision, alignment, and execution. If you are going to have a great culture, which is kind of the execution part, if your company’s going to be a great place to work, you have to have a vision for what that culture is before you can align your team around it. And then that just becomes the water you’re swimming in on the execution side. So I think that really starts with having a mission to align around. It starts with your core values, because that becomes the standard of behavior. It really comes down to the behavior, the standard you hold yourself to in terms of your behavior, because if you’re the leader, whatever you do becomes the de facto standard for behavior in your organization. And being really clear on just what you want and what you’re going to reward.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Like you said, for example, in our company, it matters to us that we assume positive intent. This is something, a concept that we got from a book called The Loyalist Team, where rather than sabotaging each other by assuming negative motives or other things like that, we really want to be intentional about assuming positive intent. Because what we know is that so much of high performance is driven by trust, and trust means that people have to feel safe. And if they feel like people are assuming positive intent, then they feel safer, they feel more likely to take risks, they feel more likely to do their best and bring new ideas forward and things like that. So those are just some of the things that we have done to develop a great culture. But I think the values piece is critical for defining your vision for what your culture is going to become.

Michael Hyatt:
You know you get this right when people are engaged. And I mean that sort of in a technical sense, because a lot of people measure corporate productivity in terms of engagement. Are people actually engaged in the work at hand and bringing to their work their best self, their whole heart, their best skills, all the rest? And that’s actually something you can measure. And in fact, we’ve had the privilege the last couple of years of winning the INC Best Places to Work award. And one of the things that they measure is engagement.

Michael Hyatt:
How much time do your teammates spend, say, scrolling through Facebook or shopping online versus actually doing the work that you’re paying them to do? So the latter is engagement, and that’s the thing that you’re after. Most companies have very low engagement numbers, I’m talking like in the 30s. Our engagement numbers are in the 90s. That’s not us measuring it, that’s INC measuring it when they do the award process. They survey all of our employees. They come back with an engagement score, and we’ve always been in the mid 90s, which is huge. But that’s a result of culture, and culture is the unseen force that drives operating results. That’s one of the things that we teach, one of the things that we believe, and one of the things that we believe attracts top talent and retains it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, I also think, in a world that is remaking itself on the backside of COVID, we have to be intentional, as we’re thinking about culture, with coming up again for ways for people to connect. I think two years ago, or even a year ago, we were all just riding the coattails of the relational equity that we had built before COVID happened. And then, if we were remote for a long period of time with mostly the same team, that was okay, because we had all this equity to draw upon. And then fast forward, now, here we are two years later. We have to reinvest. It’s sort of like we’ve taken a lot of withdrawals on that equity, and we need to reinvest culturally. We need to do things again, best-case scenario, in person to nurture the relationships that people have with their coworkers, with their supervisors, with their teams, with just the mission and the lifeblood of the company, because that drives engagement too.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And I think this is one of those things, because it’s a little amorphous, that it’s easy to discount, but it’s so critically important. People need to be together, and they need to have meaningful relationships with each other, because in many cases, the most meaningful relationships people have in their lives are with their coworkers. That’s who they spend most of their time with. So that’s not something to dismiss as you’re thinking about how to retain talent. If people are connected to the people they work with, they’re going to be more likely to stay.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, so we talked about core ideology being the first tool. We talked about a healthy culture being the second tool. I would propose that the third tool is job clarity. People need to know what winning looks like, and that starts, and this sounds really elementary but a lot of people don’t do this, and that is it starts with a position or a job description. What is it that you’re hiring to? What’s expected of that position? How have we defined what winning looks like? And when you know that, you could play your best game. If you don’t know what winning looks like, then you play around trying to figure it out on your own. Sometimes you hit it; sometimes you don’t. But that leads to a lot of frustration, a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of misalignment, and a lack of execution.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Absolutely. Well, a job description is also critically important when you’re trying to attract the right talent, because you’re really trying to discern if you are the applicant. Is this job a fit for my interests, for my skills, for my experience? And if you’re maybe in a smaller business context and that’s not something that you’ve done or it’s sloppy and not that precise, you’re going to have a hard time finding the right person. Maybe you even get a lot of applicants, but their skills and experience are not the right match for what you’re looking for, for the work that actually needs to be done.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And so this is a critical piece to, again, go back to the vision. Articulate the vision. And then, as those applicants are coming in, you can align them or not to the job description that you had, which ultimately enables there to be great execution when and if you bring them on board. So this is an important step and something we talk a lot about with our coaching clients, because it’s a step that gets skipped or not done well, and then the downstream effects tend to be negative.

Michael Hyatt:
It seems so bureaucratic, a position description. Do we really have to go through that? And I know a lot of people roll their eyes when they hear about it, but that’s really where it starts. And again, we want to begin with the end in mind. But it’s not just that. It’s also having clarity around goals. It’s having clarity around what performance looks like when it’s successful. So the more that you as a leader can do to define the win in advance, again, don’t try to dictate the details, but define the win, what winning looks like, the easier it’s going to be to recruit people and especially to retain people. People want to play with the winning team. They want to know they’re succeeding. If you’re in a job where you feel like you’re never quite measuring up or you don’t even know where the end zone is and there’s no score being kept, then that’s the kind of thing that leads to people leaving for another opportunity.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. Well, if you’re thinking about doing this on the front end of hiring, there’s a few components to a good job description that we generally incorporate into one. The first is just a company overview. If someone’s reading this and, let’s say, they’re sending it to a friend: “Hey, I think you might be a great fit for this copywriter position.” They may not have the context of your company, so including just a paragraph or so about your company as an overview would be really helpful. Then you want to have a positional overview. So let’s talk about, what is this position? Who does it report to? What is the mission, to your point, Dad, of this position? How do they know if they’re being successful? What’s the overview of what the job itself is, what the benefits are, that kind of stuff? Then what are the responsibilities?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And when I write a job description or when somebody on our team writes a job description, I like to think of these in buckets. For example, for my chief of staff, Erin Perry, and this is now being a post-hire format, but originally before I found her, here were the buckets of her job description: communication, project management, strategic planning, internal meeting and event planning, and administration. So those were the areas. And then under each one, there are three or four bullets that detail the specific responsibilities so that it’s clear that these are going to resonate with the kind of person that I wanted. In fact, when she read this, she was like, Oh my gosh, that sounds like me. And that’s exact what you want. And then, lastly, what are the proficiencies in terms of skill sets?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So again, for chief of staff, these are things like relationship management, influential leadership and decision making, planning and logistics event planning, these are all the proficiencies that she needed to have. And then what are the requirements in terms of education, physical capability if that’s relevant to the job, those kinds of things. So this is what you want. So again, you have a company overview, you have a position overview, you have the responsibilities that are detailed, and I like to bucket those under the main headings with bullets underneath with the details, what are the proficiencies that are needed, and then what are the requirements in terms of education experience or physical capabilities? And if you really get all of those things in a job description, you’re going to have a pretty professional, complete description of what the role is that you’re looking to fill.

Michael Hyatt:
And by the way, if you want to see a living example of what this looks like, you can go to fullfocus.co/careers. We have some positions open, and you could scroll down and look at those for examples.

Michael Hyatt:
So again, the tools we’re talking about for recruiting and retaining top talent, core ideology, healthy culture, job clarity, and the fourth one I’d like to propose, Megan, compelling benefits. This is where you have an opportunity to not just do what everybody else does, but to exercise a little creativity and say, what would be an amazing package that would attract the best talent and keep them, something where that they probably couldn’t get elsewhere? So we’ve done a little bit of creativity. Megan, I can remember very well when you and I sat in a hotel room in Chicago and reinvented this for our company. We said, “Okay, if we’re going to get the very best talent,” and we really had this conviction that our company was going to rise or fall based on our ability to recruit top talent and, boy, has that proven to be the case, but we said, “We’ve got to have a talent package. What would attract people so that they looked at our company and said, ‘How do I get into this company?’”

Michael Hyatt:
So just a couple of them that we have today, and I’m looking again at fullfocus.co/careers, but we have, for example, five weeks of paid time off. We have a company one-week summer vacation, where the entire company closes down for a week. So nobody has to feel guilty about not doing any work. You don’t risk getting messages from your coworkers or your supervisor, because there ain’t nobody working during that week. We have something, we have a six-hour workday. We have a culture that’s mostly remote or it’s a hybrid, where you get a little bit of the best of both worlds. You could work remotely. You don’t have to have that commute. You can get a lot done, be productive, and also be flexible with your family. But at the same time, you can come in and work at the office when the need is there.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
We also have Flex Wednesdays, which is one of my favorite benefits. This is new this year and our team is loving it, which is the freedom to choose when you want to start and end work on Wednesdays. So, for example, we have a generally a six-hour workday. If you want to start early in the morning and be done by late morning so that you can go do some other things in your personal life, that’s great.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Or if you want to take the morning for personal things and you want to work late in the afternoon, or even in the evening if that fits better for you, then that’s great too. So our team is loving that. That’s a no-meeting day for us, so synchronous work is not required, and people love autonomy. I think one of the principles that you’ll see in our list is that there’s a lot of autonomy there. And that’s one of the things that people are looking for, especially right now, especially after having worked remotely in many cases. So if there are ways that in your benefits you can incorporate autonomy in a way that works well for your context, that’s always a win. Plus, of course, we have great regular benefits, like fantastic health insurance and things like that.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. And one of the things that we have that I love and our employees love is a tiered bonus plan. A lot of times I hear leaders complain, they say, “Well, if I could just get my team to think like owners.” Well, if you want them to think like an owner, you got to treat them like an owner. And one of the things that owners do is, they share in the profits. To have some kind of bonus pool where everybody has a vested interest based on the performance of the company, but if they have a vested interest in the company performing well, then they’re fully engaged because they’ve got an upside to their job.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay. So tool number four, compelling benefits. Tool number five, and there’s a reason we’re putting this last, but it’s competitive compensation. I think a lot of people too often put this first. I’ve looked at a lot of HR studies in terms of why people stay, why people leave, what attracts people. Compensation’s definitely one of those, but it’s not usually the top one. And I’m putting it last, because that’s the one that usually gets most of our attention. But you really need to think through the other four tools first, but then get down to competitive compensation.

Michael Hyatt:
Obviously, in this market that’s so competitive, you’re not going to be able to lowball people. You’re going to have to be competitive, which means you got to do some research. You’ve got to know what the position is. You got to be a little bit careful here, because sometimes people will use the same title to describe vastly different jobs. Somebody who’s a director of marketing at Proctor & Gamble is probably different than a director of marketing for a small business in your local community. So you’ve got to look at the job content. You’ve got to look at the scope of responsibility-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
The geographical location matters.

Michael Hyatt:
Geographical location, all that stuff matters. And one of the things that we do just to make sure that we can say this with confidence when we make a job offer, or when we’re telling our people that they’re being compensated in a competitive way, we do a compensation study every couple years. We employ some outside consultants to do that. They look at industry specifics, they look at our regional specifics, they look at the job content and the job description-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
The size of our company.

Michael Hyatt:
I’m sorry?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
The size of our company.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, size of the company’s really important, like the Procter & Gamble example I gave. So all this needs to be factored in there, but I like to be able to look prospective employees or our existing employees in the eye and, with confidence, say, “I know for a fact that what you’re being paid is competitive.” And, frankly, our standard is, we want to be above market, not vastly above market, that wouldn’t be good for us or good for the longevity the company, but we want to be paying better than just average or fair. We want to dial it up a notch from there.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, and this also helps you when people come to you who are on your team and they say, “Well, I think I’m being underpaid, because I saw on Glassdoor that a marketing director makes whatever, whatever.” And what you can say is, “Well, actually, we’ve had this third party analyze our compensation, and based on all the factors, data that you just mentioned, you’re in the whatever percentile.” And it’s really helpful to do that, because the problem on sites like Glassdoor and others is they don’t factor all the variables. They don’t make visible all the variables that drive compensation. And like you said, titles are not apples to apples in most cases. There’s no title police that says that a marketing director here must be the same as a marketing director over here.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
It’s obviously totally discretionary. And I think sometimes employees or prospective employees don’t know that. And so they have expectations that are not aligned with real market data. And that’s where having a third party is really helpful, because it might be difficult for them to trust you as the business owner just saying that based on whatever your anecdotal research would be, but if you have it verified by a third-party organization, then it really enables you to stand with confidence and integrity to say, “We know for sure that we’re paying you competitively.” And so I think that’s been a real empowering thing for us and for our team, as well as particularly when we’re recruiting people.

Michael Hyatt:
One of the things you can do if you’re not in a position where you feel like you could hire an outside firm to do a compensation study is, you can go to a website like Robert Half, and one of the things that they publish is an annual salary guide for 500-plus positions. And so it’s a place to start. It’s not as good as a customized salary guide that will take into account your specific regional location, but it’s better than nothing, and it objectifies it.

Michael Hyatt:
The other thing I was going to say, Megan, is that I think, as a business owner, one of the things you can do is educate your team on the front end before they discover on the back end that sites like Glassdoor are not the best place to be doing that kind of research. At best, it’s kind of anecdotal, and it’s not going to give them accurate information and oftentimes leads to frustration or disillusionment. And I would just say to people on the front end, just say, “Hey, look, you might be tempted to go look at a website like Glassdoor to see if we’re fairly compensating. We would advise you against that, and here’s why. But here’s a better way to do it.” And then if you could provide something like the salary guide that Robert Half provides or a special custom survey that you’ve done, that’s even much better.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Just to be clear, we’re not going to take this report that we’ve gotten from our compensation consultants and publish it like a report for our team. Obviously, that’s sensitive information that would compromise the confidentiality of other positions in the company and would not be probably good for morale or for the company. But we want to be able to say, and we can, is that we have had this analyzed by a third party and therefore we can confidently tell you that you’re being paid competitively and above market for your position. So that’s what we would say. What we would not do is disclose all the salary ranges for all the positions in the whole company, because you can imagine that could be a disaster if you weren’t careful.

Michael Hyatt:
Chaos would ensue.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right.

Michael Hyatt:
And we want to avoid that. Okay. So we’ve talked basically about five different tools that we can use to attract and retain the top talent. Number one, core ideology. Number two, healthy culture. Number three, job clarity. Number four, compelling benefits, and number five, competitive compensation. And these are roughly, we think, in the order of importance, but we believe that if you do these, you will be able to get the people that you need to run and scale the business that you dream of. So, Megan, any final thoughts?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, I think this is a more complicated issue than people think. I think oftentimes it feels overwhelming and we’re not even sure how to think about it as business owners or leaders, and yet it’s critically important that we have a strategy in place, especially in a market with as much scarcity as there is around talent. We’ve got to get the right people on the bus, and once they’re on the bus, we’ve got to keep them on the bus. And so I think there is almost nothing more important to be thinking about right now than this.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And at the same time we understand that it can be overwhelming, and that’s why we’ve invested so much time and energy into building this into our curriculum in our coaching program, because we want to empower and equip business owners and executives to do the things that we have been talking about today with very specific strategies and solutions. So if you’re interested in going deeper with that and understanding whether you might be missing something at the vision, alignment, or execution level with regard to hiring top talent and retaining people, I just want to encourage you to book a call to complete that business-performance assessment that we talked about earlier, because I think that can give you some real insight into how to make sure you are designing your strategy in such a way that you’ve got the best advantage possible in this kind of market.

Michael Hyatt:
And again, that performance-assessment call is free. All you need to do is go to businessaccelerator.com/podcast. Guys, thank you so much for joining us. Megan, thank you for your insights. Until next week, Lead to Win.