Finding competent and qualified employees is a major challenge many businesses face in 2023. And once you’ve found them, having them stick around long-term is an even bigger one.
Fortunately, there is something you can do as a business owner/employer that can increase your chances of hanging on to your best people: you can give them choices when it comes to the computer and smartphone hardware you want them to use to do their jobs.
And I don’t mean a basic choice from the range of cheap desktops, laptops, and smartphones that your business bought to save on costs; I mean a real choice from big-name branded hardware, the kind of devices that they either already own as private consumers or which they aspire to own someday.
COPE with extra steps
But Stuff Business, you cry, that sounds like COPE with extra steps. Well, you’d be wrong – COPE, or Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled, is a subtly different way of going about giving your employees access to business devices.
When going the COPE route, the business procures devices for their employees to use and manages them to within an inch of their lives but leaves enough wiggle room for the employees to use them for personal use to a small extent.
What we’re proposing is something known as an “Employee Choice Programme”, whereby businesses offer their employees their choice of high-quality, high-performance, brand-name laptops, desktops, and smartphones to use for work.
And because there are many millennials in the workforce right now, and because millennials like Apple products, there’s a good chance the brand of hardware they’ll opt for is Apple. If you can’t offer that, there’s a good chance those millennials will look elsewhere for work.
But no matter their background, if given the choice, most employees will prefer to work on powerful computer and smartphone hardware as that makes their jobs easier.
Compelling Benefits
There are some compelling benefits to offering these preferred platforms:
- Work devices from the same ecosystem as personal devices increases staff productivity
- Familiarity with those ecosystems means faster onboarding and less training
- Having a choice of devices makes employees feel valued
But Stuff Business, you cry again, that stuff is expensive! We can’t afford those nice things, that’s why we give our staff cheap computers that take ages to do anything and phones that came out years ago! It’s all we can afford (and our bean counters really like them)!
Yes, and that’s why your staff turnover is probably quite high. Unsurprisingly, people don’t like working on infuriatingly slow devices, and when that’s all they are offered, they rightly feel undervalued, unappreciated, and unimportant. Would you want to work in such an environment?
And with the major skills shortage in South Africa right now, there’s any number of other jobs your best workers could potentially walk into tomorrow if they leave your employ. Basically, you need to give them reasons to stick around, and to boost what the big corporates are calling your “employee value proposition”. Employee Choice Programmes are a great way of doing exactly that.
There are others, but this strategy focuses on technology more than anything else so it’s what we’re focusing on. For other strategies, click here.
Okay, you’ve convinced me. Now what?
What you’ll need next is a “managed service provider” to come in and handle all of your business devices on your behalf.; there are plenty out there if you know what to Google. Hint: “top IT managed service providers South Africa” is a good start.
What these companies do, is they come to your business, evaluate your IT needs, and then draw up a plan to meet those needs, which they will offer to do on a subscription basis whereby you pay them a fee every month and they handle everything for you. You get to use their expertise, benefit from their experience, leverage their network of technology partners, and it won’t cost you nearly as much as doing everything yourself.
These companies can tailor your Employee Choice Programme for you and offer advice on which devices you could potentially offer your employees, and then set up a programme to procure, service, and support those devices on your behalf.
Treat employees like they matter
Treat your staff like they matter, show that you value them and their opinions on technology, and you’ll have a happy, long-serving workforce that will sing your praises to the high heavens (and potentially attract even more high-skill workers).
Not only will you satisfy your employees’ needs by doing this, you’ll potentially keep them around for longer and possibly even save money in the process. There really is no losing here.
