One of the unfortunate results of COVID is the toll it takes on businesses. And as we face our tenth month of this new reality, businesses are struggling with new realities of their own: recruiting and keeping employees when sick people cannot work.
Employee Recruitment, Retention and Flexibility
HS has talked a lot about how businesses have adapted during a pandemic. We’ve marveled at the creative ways businesses adapted and attracted new customers. HS is proud to have been some small part in helping businesses do that.
Today, businesses face a more basic operational challenge:
- How do they adjust operations without full staff?
- How do they launch policies and procedures to protect staff?
- How do they attract new talent when staff is out?
- How do they keep employee morale high amid such levels of uncertainty?
HS has helped companies do this in many different ways. As things evolve and change, we certainly don’t have all the answers. But much of our work lately has involved employee recruitment, communicating new policies, programs to boost internal morale and even structural and signage changes (by the HS Sign Shop) brought about by COVID.
We’ve done this in a number of ways:
- Digital campaigns to help attract new talent, fill open positions
- Multi-media campaigns to support employee recruitment
- Developing internal programs to celebrate company resiliency and achievements
- Restructuring websites to reflect new business models
- And in general, doing whatever we can to help businesses operate “normally”
The New Normal is to be Un-normal
If we’ve learned anything these past several months, it’s that normal changes by the week. The best we can do is think “un-normal”. What does that look like in practice?
- Preparing for employee attrition and anticipating it
- Continuing to recruit and keep a solid group of talent, even if you can’t hire them now
- Brainstorming on how staff can be flexibly scheduled or share workloads
- Communicating effectively and transparently with staff
- Being authentic, realistic and nimble
When we talk about strategy at HS, these are the things we discuss. We are not here to just solve a logo problem or an advertising problem, we’re here to help solve business problems. We’re here to be an agency that thinks on your behalf in the toughest of times.
One of the things we’ve helped businesses a lot with lately is creating campaigns to target specific job titles, for example, nurses/LPN or manufacturing workers. We’ve placed digital media to specifically target people with those job titles using digital radio, CTV/OTT, programmatic display ads, LinkedIn, Indeed and even social media.
Helping with employee recruitment is just one way HS helps ease the burden on marketing departments and business. We always act as an extension of your business.
Being Crazy Obsessed about It, Because We’ve Been There Too
HS has had to adapt too. All of the challenges highlighted above, we’ve had to face as a business, too. That’s where empathy and experience come into play. We’ve lived it – and we know how personal it is.
Being Crazy Obsessed has helped. Crazy Obsessed is our “un-normal”. It’s a way of thinking that never rests until we figure out how to solve a problem. It’s also a way of thinking that continually challenges us to anticipate problems, be they in workflow, economy, illness, market conditions or increased competition.
The same things your business is doing — or should be doing — every day. As you look ahead to the challenges and opportunities of 2021, know that HS is here to help.
