Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Employers adjust to labor market
Unemployment is at its lowest since 2007
Suddenly, your employer wants to know what you think. And there’s more concern about competitive pay, less concern about employees working at home, and new opportunities for stock options and vacation getaways.
That’s because South Florida employers have not seen a competitive labor market like today’s for quite some time. Unemployment is 4.9 percent, its lowest point since 2007. More employers are hiring and recruiting away employees with better salaries, benefits and perks.
With workers having more choices, employers are striving harder to retain existing talent, as well as making their companies more attractive to new recruits.
South Florida companies are updating pay and benefits; providing stock options and bonuses; adding work flexibility such as telecommuting; providing more desirable time off; and recognizing top performers. Listening more regularly to their employees is key to avoid losing them to another employer, local companies say.
“It is a challenge. Everybody is focusing on retention strategies,” said Janet Winkco, human resources director for City Furniture. The retail chain based in Tamarac is one of several local companies that are making changes to help retain their employees.
While facing a tighter labor market, companies also are seeing dramatic changes in workforce expectations, said Fort Lauderdale leadership consultant Richard Clark.
“The millennial generation has really redefined in their minds what they consider a work-life balance, changing the entire attitude of the American worker about work,” he said of those workers aged 20 to 36, and now the largest living generation.
For millennials, “there’s no reason to drive to work when you can work from home,” he said. And when couples have families, they want to find jobs that give them the ability to raise their families. “That’s a different dynamic than we had
in the last generation,” said Clark, president of Clark Leadership Consulting in Fort Lauderdale.
So employers are having to adjust.
At City Furniture, Winkco heard sales employees repeatedly complain about working on weekends — they wanted to spend more time with their families.
So City Furniture devised a schedule that would allow every showroom employee to take off one weekend and one weekday within a designated work period. “That’s what they’re looking for,” she said.
Winkco thinks the change also will help with recruiting. “When we’re out on college campuses recruiting we hear, ‘I don’t want to work every single weekend.’ We’re doing this to retain our current workforce, but also to attract the workforce we’re trying to hire.”
City Furniture, which employs 1,400 people, holds 25 to 50 feedback sessions a year. “We spend a lot of time listening to our employees in addition to annual engagement surveys,” Winkco said.
In those sessions, she asks, “What are the things when you leave your shift and get in your car that you say, ‘I wish that was better or different’?”
Because the company has developed a “culture of listening,” employees “are not afraid to speak up. I’ve never led a feedback session that didn’t have participation,” Winkco said.
Of course, what some employees want is more pay. Several local companies have taken steps to ensure they’re competitive on that front.
Fort Lauderdale-based AutoNation, which employs thousands of sales people around the country, rolled out a new compensation system in late 2016 that provides sales people — traditionally on commission — with a base salary.
Salary can amount to $2,000 a month, which is combined with commission per vehicle sold, and bonuses for trade-ins and positive feedback on customer satisfaction surveys, said Dan Best, director of human resources for AutoNation. New hires, who also get three months of training pay at $3,000 a month, went on the new compensation plan in December, while existing sales people were given the option to participate.
Just over 60 percent of AutoNation’s sales people are now on the salary-based plan, he said.
AutoNation has combined its new compensation model with more education in the field. Over eight months, the company trained more than 5,600 sales professionals across the country on management and leadership skills.
One reason? Good managers help retain employees, he said.
“Everybody can use a polish up on people management skills. But it’s critical when workforce really has a lot of options and people are calling them [to recruit them],” Best said.
Competitive pay was a concern for e-Builder, a growing construction management software maker in Plantation. So it summoned a consultant to review the pay of its more than 200 workers nationwide. The result was increased pay in some cases and a stock-option program for all employees.
“We didn’t want to wait for an employee to sit down and say, ‘I don’t think you’re paying me what you should and I’m going down the street and work for another company,’ ” said Ron Antevy, CEO and co-founder of e-Builder with his brother Jon Antevy.
With the stock options, “people feel they’re more connected and they’re partowners. There’s a pride of ownership that’s contagious,” Ron Antevy said.
Boca Raton-based IT staffing firm Consultis ties recruiters’ pay to the contracts they land, which builds year over year if they keep that business.
“It’s hard to keep recruiters. They’ll pop from company to company,” said Jamie Delsing, managing partner of Consultis, which has five offices around the country. “As long as they can build up their numbers, it behooves them to stay.”
The companies say workplace flexibility also is important to many workers today, especially millennials.
The National Council on Compensation Insurance, a workers compensation data company based in Boca Raton, recognized that fact and rolled out a pilot workat-home program a few years ago. It was successful and “it has really taken off here,” said Andrea Corsi, human resources director.