Getting and keeping the best employees requires ‘new now’ policies focusing on sincerity

To get and keep the best employees in the new now, employers must look back in time to embrace the traditions of truthtelling, transparency and a total commitment to empowering and engaging their workforces.

Sincerity is king. While details of empowering and engaging workforces in an increasingly complicated world is a full-time task, the basics are simple and straightforward: Be straight with—and do right by—your workforce. Do it consistently. And build upon successful experiences to propagate the positive process.

This needs to be a two-way street, or dissatisfaction on one side or the other will lead to turnover. Employees must reciprocate with straight talk and performance that do right by the employer.

By establishing and talking through these core values at the outset, candidates and company decision-makers can establish how good a fit exists and move on to the next steps—whatever they may be.

By staying true to this plan, companies and candidates alike can quickly get past the awkward initial meeting chatter and get down to business.

While large businesses are now talking the talk about all this, and are professing enlightenment in treatment of employees, smaller companies remain the backbone of this nation’s commerce platform and employ the lion’s share of people. So, it’s up to us to move the mantle of employee engagement and empowerment forward.

Too often, companies of any size (particularly smaller ones) feel like they need to sidestep this process. Some just don’t want to go the extra mile to find and keep the best people. Typically, they find out the hard way that the cost of continual rehiring and retraining far exceeds that of the investment to consistently hire and retain the right people.

How do we know all this? As a three-plus decades established loan servicing company, employee engagement and empowerment is part of our DNA. We knew from the outset that a committed, caring workforce is a chief cornerstone of growing the business.

We didn’t deploy some fancy, trendy employee hiring and development program to move the process along. Instead, we adopted—and adapted—policies and procedures that form the backbone of a healthy, solid family-oriented relationship, and infused them into our company.