According to the 2018 Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Summit report, 70% of small businesses struggle to find and retain skilled talent.

At 70 percent, this issue is nearly a pandemic among small businesses.

In fact, according to the Summit (the largest gathering of U.S. small business owners), recruiting was the top barrier preventing small businesses from growing more quickly.

Without the right employees, it’s hard for small businesses to grow and thrive.

So, what’s a small business to do?

The good news is that there are many ways to attract and retain high-level talent. You may just have to play outside of the traditional benefits sandbox.

Let’s take a look at five proven ways your small business can recruit and retain top talent.

1. Offer Flexible Work Schedules

Today’s employees value flexibility.

People live unique and varied lives. And – this may come as a surprise to some – employees are people. (More about this later.)

Flex hours, flex days, and remote work provide employees with the ability to balance their work lives and their personal lives.

Whether your employees struggle to juggle daycare schedules, band practice or trips to the gym, everyone benefits from some flexibility in life.

Ctrip’s Remote Experiment

Chinese travel website Ctrip conducted an experiment where they allowed half of their workforce to work remotely for 9 months.

When the experiment ended, Ctrip found that their employees were 13% more productive working from home than the office and that the business had saved roughly $1900 per remote employee.

Your Action Plan

Offer flex time. Flex time can be executed a number of ways. It can mean having defined windows for arrival and departure (for instance, employees must arrive between 9am – 10:15 and leave between 5pm and 6:15). Or, it can mean that employees can work whatever hours they choose as long as they meet a minimum number of hours or complete a minimum number of tasks. 

Budget for flex days. Flex days can also be interpreted a number of ways. Some companies offer days off that are accrued by working extra hours during the days that are worked during the week. 

Allow your employees to work remotely. Working remotely simply means working from a location that is not your office. Provide employees with portable laptops instead of PCs so they can take their work on the go. 

2. Provide Opportunities for Advancement

The promise of career advancement is a compelling enticement for new hires and current employees.

Higher status, new challenges and an increase in pay are appealing, particularly for the top-level talent small businesses are seeking.

If you want to attract – and hold onto – skilled employees, you have to give them opportunities to grow with your business.

The facts support this.  A 2016 Gallup poll found that 87% of millennials feel that career growth opportunities are important in a job.

Newsflash – millennials are your future employees!

However, small businesses often have short corporate ladders and limited funding for higher salaries.

But, don’t be discouraged. While you may not be able to offer a corner office and a three-figure salary, that’s okay. Small businesses have other traits in their favor.

Your Action Plan

Speak openly and speak often… about the opportunities for advancement at your company. Make sure your job candidates know what the path to advancement looks like at your business.

Keep the conversation going. Continue to touch base with employees once they’re hired. Discuss employee’s strengths and values. And touch base about how they feel about where their career is now… and where they’d like it to go.

Walk the talk. Don’t just talk about advancement – support your employees when the time comes for them to evolve into a new role. Be open to their feedback and give them the autonomy to create their own path if it supports your business.

3. Create a Positive Corporate Culture

The average American spends most of their day at work.

If your business has a toxic work culture – retention will suffer and you’ll have trouble getting quality talent in the door.

But, if you build it (a positive work culture), they will come.

Okay, so maybe your office isn’t the Field of Dreams.

But, a positive work culture has a tremendous impact on your employees.

Emma Seppala and Kim Cameron of the Harvard Business Review write in their article “Proof That Positive Work Cultures Are More Productive“:

…a large and growing body of research on positive organizational psychology demonstrates that not only is a cut-throat environment harmful to productivity over time, but that a positive environment will lead to dramatic benefits for employers, employees, and the bottom line.

Corporate culture can be a mysterious intangible thing. But it is immediately detectable.

Your Action Plan

Acknowledge and reward good work. The Gallup Business Journal  recently shared,

The best managers promote a recognition-rich environment, with praise coming from every direction and everyone aware of how others like to receive appreciation.

Good work can be rewarded with simple words of praise, public recognition in front of peers, monetary bonuses, awards, positive evaluations, and promotions. Just make sure to recognize your employees’ contributions… or they won’t be your employees for long.

Establish corporate values. Millennial consumers are known for their desire to align themselves with brands that share their values. Millennial employees want to feel that their work matters and speaks to values as well.

Foster social connections. Encourage your employees to think of and treat each other as teammates. In fact, research has shown that employees with a “best friend” at work tend to perform better than employees without a close social connection.

4. Treat Your Employees Like People

We’ve all heard that business is business. “It’s not personal.”

But, work is personal. We work with people all day long.

When companies fail to remember that employees are people, those companies falter.

If you want to keep employees around, showing them care as human beings is a great way to do it.

I learned this lesson when I worked as a corporate trainer.

We were taught that our students don’t care what you know, until they know that you care.

So, in order to connect with and successfully train students, it was essential to treat those students with respect and care.

The same is true of employers and employees. Employees respect companies that respect them. And, employees want to invest in companies that invest in them. This reciprocity is actually a documented concept of social psychology.

Your Action Plan

Respect personal commitments and crises. If an employee experiences a death in the family or a medical emergency provide them with the time, space, and support they need to get through it.

Don’t be the employer who says, “Yes, I know you’re having surgery. But, will you be in that day?”

If an employee needs to pick up their kids from daycare, don’t shame them for leaving early. Instead, talk about how to best structure their work so that they can still accomplish all of their goals. 

Give your employees the autonomy to do their job in their most productive way. This may mean allowing for flexible hours (which we already know you’re going to start doing, right?), providing a converter to create a standing desk station, or simply refraining from micro-managing.

Support your employees’ well-being. Allow employees to hit the gym during work hours. Offer incentives for making healthy life choices like quitting smoking, exercising or meditating. Or, even initiate your own company health program with access to a gym and personal trainers.

If you care about your people, your people will care for your business.

5. Crowdsourcing as a Talent Scaling Solution

Sometimes, you can get bogged down when hiring for a specific position. At other times, you need only part-time help or someone who can easily scale their hours to match your needs.

In such cases, consider crowdsourcing as a talent scaling solution. 

Hiring people is hard. There’s a lot that goes into the decision. From recognizing the need to justifying the costs, sifting through applicants and interviewing standouts, negotiating contracts and onboarding new hires — it’s a complex process with a lot of room for error.

The stakes are even higher for [small businesses and] startups. Every penny spent has got to deliver a return, and new hires take a whole lot of pennies. What’s more, those new hires, if they’re worth their salt, are probably going to turn around and ask you to spend even more pennies to make it possible for them to do their job. This is especially true when it comes to marketing and design.

But this is where crowdsourcing can help minimize risk and maximize return.

There are three distinct ways using crowdsourcing platforms for your creative needs can help you better manage how you scale your team.

1. Temporary talent stop gaps — Let’s face it. Sometimes a [small business or] startup simply does not have the budget to hire a designer full-time. Sometimes they don’t have the money to hire a traditional freelancer. 

2. Longer-term Freelance Relationships — One of the really cool things about creative crowdsourcing platforms is that they are a seriously deep talent pool where you’re exposed to tremendous professionals you might not otherwise have been able to reach with your recruitment efforts or in your own searches for assistance on the web. 

3. Employment Auditions — Perhaps one of the most underutilized features of creative crowdsourcing platforms is the leveraging of the talent pool for direct hiring purposes. Not only do these projects let you see the design chops of the participants, but they showcase things like communication skills, receptiveness to criticism, work pace, and more. 

Many of our clients leverage crowdspring in just this way. Over the past decade, our community of 210,000 creatives has helped some of the world’s best small businesses, entrepreneurs, agencies, Brands and non-profits with logo design, website design, print design, product design, packaging design, and even naming businesses and products.

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But, even if you’re not convinced that climate change is a real problem, there’s still plenty of reason to prioritize a greener, sustainable future. A 2017 peer-reviewed study in the Lancet revealed that pollution continues to be a major global health concern.

According to the study, pollution was responsible for roughly 9 million premature deaths in 2015. This makes pollution the “largest environmental cause of disease and death in the world today.”

The great news is that product companies and product designers are in a prime position to make a really positive impact.  Companies designing products and product designers can protect our planet – and people’s health – through sustainable design choices.

But, what is sustainable design?

The World Commission on Environment and Development defines sustainable design or development as:

…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

When creating new products, both companies and product designers can advocate and design for the use of green materials.  They can design products that minimize waste and energy consumption.

We can all agree that selling products is great, but designing and selling products that support global health instead of undermining it is even better. Challenge yourself to design a better tomorrow with these proven green product design strategies for a more sustainable future.

Design for Improved Product Lifecycle

One of the most effective ways to design greener products is to think beyond the product itself and optimize the product’s entire “lifecycle.” Each and every product goes through a lifecycle of at least 4 stages:

1. Manufacturing
2. Transportation
3. Use
4. Disposal

Each of these stages offers opportunities to create or minimize waste and consume or save energy.

So start your design process by taking a step back to reflect on the lifecycle of your product. Find the lifecycle phases with the biggest negative impacts and focus on improving those in your design process.

Here are some questions to consider when examining a product’s lifecycle:

• How much energy is needed to…
  • acquire the raw materials?
  • assemble the product?
  • transport the product to retail locations or ship it to consumers’ homes?
• How much energy does the product consume?
• How much waste does the manufacturing process produce?
• Will the product be recycled or repurposed at the end of its life?
• Will the product biodegrade quickly?

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can begin to identify the biggest sustainability pain points.

“Green” product design doesn’t just mean avoiding toxic chemicals and choosing to build from recycled materials. The product’s manufacture, transport, and operation also impact the product’s sustainability.

Find design solutions that will decrease the highest instances of energy expenditure and waste during your product’s lifetime. Then, ask yourself what will happen to the product when that life ends.

Consider these options to keep your product out of landfills:

Cradle to Cradle

Cradle to cradle thinking plans ahead for your product’s next life.

Plan to recycle your product into something entirely new. Or remove and refurbish components for use in a new device. Or even turn it into fuel to produce something else. As the product designer, the choice is yours and while it takes some planning and thinking, many companies and designers have successfully executed cradle to cradle product design strategies.

And don’t forget sustainable packaging design. After all, once your product is unboxed, the packaging is typically thrown away.

Design for Disassembly

Design for disassembly means that you design with the intent of making it easy to get to the components that will later be used elsewhere. It’s a strategy that supports cradle to cradle thinking.

If it’s too hard to take your product apart, it may never live that second or third life you had dreamed for it in your cradle to cradle planning.

Choose Green Materials

The most obvious way to design a more sustainable and eco-friendly product is to choose “green” materials.

Your first criteria to check when choosing product materials is how it will function in the role you’ve chosen for it?

Look for materials that are:

• Non-toxic. I don’t like being poisoned – do you like being poisoned? Enough said.
• Abundant. Materials that exist in large quantities are a better, more sustainable  and affordable choice. Avoid rare materials or you run the risk of completely depleting a resource from our planet. And, as a material becomes more scarce, the price tends to skyrocket.
• Easily Reproduced. Materials that can be easily reproduced are, by definition, sustainable. Think of wood (which can be grown, harvested and regrown) as opposed to coal (a finite resource) which will inevitably run out.
• Rapidly Renewable. Rapidly renewable materials are not only reproducible but quick to reproduce like bamboo, cotton, natural rubber, and cork.
• Low Waste. Choose materials that produce less waste.  For instance, it takes 85 lbs of material to create 1 lb of virgin aluminum, but only 7 lbs of material to create 1 lb of virgin steel.
• Recycled, Recyclable or Biodegradable.  You will create less waste and save energy (that would otherwise be expended creating new virgin materials) by using recycled materials.

Make Choices That Reduce Consumption

The heart of sustainability is to avoid using more resources than we can replenish in a useful span of time. One of the easiest ways for a product designer to make more sustainable choices is by reducing the amount of materials or energy that will go into a product in the first place.

Here are a few strategies to minimize your next product’s resource consumption:

Prioritize Energy Efficiency 

Materials that require less energy to produce, transport, operate, and dispose of are said to have low embodied energy. You can design products with a smaller carbon footprint by using materials with low embodied energy.

Lightweighting

Lightweighting is a strategy that focuses on making your product with less material – hence, making it lighter in weight. This has a positive environmental impact across the board – from the amount of energy needed to acquire the materials, to the volume of resources consumed, to the amount of energy needed to transport and dispose of the product.

Lengthen Product Lifespan

Designing a product to last is a very effective green technique.

Think about it. Purchasing one sweater over ten years consumes fewer resources than purchasing ten sweaters over ten years. And, it’s not just the resources. It’s the embodied energy of one sweater lifecycle vs. the embodied energy of ten sweater lifecycles.

In fact, even some “green” products can be less green than a single product that lasts a long time.  For instance, a single ceramic plate used over and over is a more environmentally responsible choice than a stack of disposable, biodegradable paper plates.

Sustainable Product Design Can Make a Difference:

Companies and product designers have a lot of power to make choices that positively impact our environment – and by extension – us. It may be a whole new way of approaching a design challenge for you. But, it’s worth it.

When faced with a seemingly insurmountable challenge like fighting global pollution we often ask ourselves, “I’m just one person, what can I do?” But companies and product designers who make responsible informed choices about the design of their products can make the world a better place for all of us.

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