A lot to be desired
Steve Rockey: Why don’t more small businesses make the Most Desirable Employers lists?
Over the course of the last few weeks I’ve been getting my hands (and knees, as it happens) incredibly dirty.
That’s because I’ve been playing my role in not only one of the greatest moments in Big Easy’s history, but in one of the UK’s biggest restaurant openings this year.
The addition of our third restaurant, which is 11,500 square foot and expects 1500 guests through the door every day, takes our employee count from 250 to 450, nearly doubling all that we know overnight.
Because of this, I have spent a disproportionate amount of my life in Canary Wharf, where the new restaurant will open, and I’ve been checking out the ebbs and flows of life. Specifically, I’ve been watching the potential customers our people will greet, serve and engage with on a daily basis.
My notes are as follows:
- Lots of blokes (by which I actually mean all blokes) wear black shoes. I actually asked someone about this. He said that brown shoes were ‘banned’.
- Lots of people (by which I mean everyone) swarm out of their office at 12:15pm (having waited for 15 mins for the lift).
- Lots of people (by which I mean everyone) are expert queuers. I have counted 40 people queuing for a burrito, and 50 for salad. Don’t get me started on the hot dog queue. Nobody gets agitated, there are no cross words – just calm queuing.
- Everyone loves a drink!
I dub these the ‘People’.
So that’s one list. Another interesting one appeared in a recent HR Grapevine article, which was 20 of the UK’s supposedly most desirable employers.
Big is beautiful – apparently
That list was somewhat frustrating. It seems that in the UK nobody sees small businesses as desirable workplaces.
85% of the list’s businesses were big ones, in which ‘People’ (see above) are cogs in wheels. Numbers, not names. Though they do get ‘kudos’ of having worked for a large multinational on their CV, I guess.
Luckily for me, the article kindly pointed out how I can attract ‘People’ into my obviously ‘undesirable’, small organisation.
Phew. Cheers, guys.
Apparently, to build a brand I need to make sure that my messaging is authentic, I need to get buy-in from the top (I guess that means I need to make sure no-one I work with thinks what I do is ‘fluffy’ or a s*** idea) and mobilise my ‘ambassadors’, which I take to mean the people I work with.
From my perspective, I suspect smaller businesses are better able to do this than large ones, and so should actually be seen as more appealing.
Down and dirty
A business is surely most authentic when the person who created it and people leading it are working alongside everyone else, putting together tables and chairs, as was the case in our new site.
As for getting buy-in from the top, I’ve recently seen some really awful corporate recruitment advertising (particularly from some of the businesses on that most desirable list). So the part about making sure the idea isn’t rubbish clearly isn’t happening in larger businesses.
As for ambassadors, I’d much rather work in a place where I could talk to anyone honestly about the business rather than one in which there’s an ‘ambassador department’.
For me, smaller businesses naturally have what larger businesses must set out to create: authenticity, both great and s*** ideas and a whole group of people who will happily talk all day about who they work with and why.
So if small businesses aren’t getting onto this kind of list, well – maybe we should look at building better, more representative, lists?
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