ASSESSING WHERE YOU ARE

Assessing Where You Are

Assessing Where You Are and Navigating Good Jobs, Good Business To assess where you are in terms of meeting your employees" needs, creating great experiences for your customers, and driving operational performance, the Good Jobs Scorecard developed by the Good Jobs Institute is a fantastic place to start and will provide you with a comprehensive picture of where your business currently stands.

Once you're ready to get started with the toolkit, we suggest you ask two important questions to guide which sections will be most useful to you in offering good jobs and strengthening your business.

Ask yourself:
"What are your two or three biggest challenges regarding your workforce, human resources, or benefits at your company?"

Pinpointing the greatest challenges your business is facing will help you identify which area(s) of the toolkit to focus on first. Comparing your answer to your employees" responses to the question below can also provide helpful perspective on which dimensions of job quality to prioritize.

Ask your employees:
"What changes to your job would be the most valuable to you and why?"

While you may not be able to address everything your employees would like, due to resource, financial, and other considerations, it's important to identify what's most important to them so that you can provide valuable plans, design effective programs, and develop meaningful engagement strategies.

While businesses differ based on size and challenges, below are some examples:

" My employees want to feel more engaged and valued." Start with Employee Engagement and check out Employee Compensation.

" I have high employee turnover, which drives up my costs." Start with Hiring, Training, and Professional Development and Employee Engagement.

" I want to provide benefits, but it's too costly and I'm not sure how to select the plan that makes the most sense for my business." Start with Health Benefits and Retirement Savings and Other Wealth- Building Strategies.

If you're not sure where to begin, check out the free tools from the Good Jobs Institute, which assesses current practices and identifies opportunities for improvement. There are pro-bono business advisors available here through Fidelis Capital Group who happy to work with you to use this toolkit. ..click here>>

THE CASE FOR GOOD JOBS

The Good Jobs Strategy

Almost one-in-four American workers has a job that pays less than a living wage. Conventional wisdom says providing jobs with low wages, minimal benefits, little training, and chaotic schedules are the only way companies can keep costs down and prices low. MIT Sloan Associate Professor Zeynep Ton makes the compelling case that the presumed trade-off between investment in employees and low prices can be broken. Drawing on more than 15 years of research, Ton's Good Jobs Strategy shows how operational excellence enables companies to offer low prices to customers while ensuring good jobs for their employees and superior results for their investors or owners.

The Good Jobs Strategy creates superior value for employees, customers, and investor/owners by combining investment in employees with four operational choices that increase employee productivity, contribution, and motivation.

The four operational choices: Focus and Simplify, Standardize and Empower, Cross-Train and Operate With Slack, drive performance and continuous improvement. In this way, the Good Jobs Strategy creates a virtuous cycle where investment in people and operational excellence reinforce each other to drive value. At the same time, these operational choices work best with a trained and motivated workforce and hence require investment in people. !

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FOUR OPERATIONAL CHOICES

Four Operational Choices

1. Focus and Simplify
   Good Jobs Strategy companies have a clear strategic focus. They have clarity and alignment on the ideal customer experience and what problem they are solving for their customers, and make strategic trade-offs consistent with that focus. They then simplify their operations, applying real rigor around new products, services, promotions, communication, processes and tools to maximize customer satisfaction and employee productivity.
2. Standardize and Empower
   Good Jobs Strategy companies standardize routine processes and empower frontline employees to improve those processes and to make decisions for their customers. Employee involvement in the standardization process increases buy-in and conformance to standards. Standardization also gives employees clear expectations for their performance and enables them to focus more on the tougher choices that really do require human judgment. Empowering employees to solve customer problems and taking their ideas for improvement seriously lets them respond to customer needs and help the company cut costs.
3. Cross Train
   Good Jobs Strategy companies cross-train employees to perform both customer-facing tasks and other tasks so that they can shift according to customer traffic. Cross-training improves customer service because employees are able to respond to customer needs more quickly. It means employees are busy even when there are no customers. It also enables companies to offer more predictable schedules. At Good Jobs companies, cross-training is done in a way that ensures mastery; not everyone is cross-trained in everything. Cross-training improves employee motivation because they can use a variety of skills and feel like part of a team in which everyone works together to serve customers well.
4. Operate with Slack
   Good Jobs Strategy companies staff their stores with more labor hours than the expected workload so they can meet customer demand at peak periods. Operate With Slack enables employees to work without making errors to serve customers well. When employees have time to identify and communicate improvement ideas and problem-solve, they help cut costs everywhere else in the system.

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GOOD JOBS STRATEGY VALUES

Operate With Slack enables managers to lead and develop employees rather than constantly fire-fight. It makes work more meaningful by enabling employees to create more value for their customers. Operate With Slack also enables employees to have more predictable schedules and take time off when they are sick or have emergencies without feeling guilty that they will hurt their team.

Invest in People
Good Jobs Companies invest in people in a way that creates a virtuous cycle with operations to improve performance.

The Good Jobs Strategy Values
Good Jobs Strategy companies may have any number of values unique to them, but all have three constants: putting the customer first, recognizing employees as their most important resource, and a commitment to a culture of continuous improvement.

Good Jobs Resources
Throughout this toolkit, you will see aspects of the Good Jobs Strategy and how they come together to help small businesses offer quality jobs. If you are interested in learning more, you can read The Good Jobs Strategy by Zeynep Ton. The Good Jobs institute, a non-profit founded to help companies thrive by creating good jobs, also has a website where companies can learn more about how to implement the Good Jobs Strategy through free case studies, articles, and tools, including:

Good Jobs Scorecard: The Good Jobs Scorecard will help you collect and track key employee, customer and operation performance metrics which can help you make the financial, competitive and moral argument for good jobs at your business. Good Jobs Diagnostic: This 86-question comprehensive survey lets you identify which elements of the Good Jobs Strategy your company currently practices and where there are opportunities for improvement. The Good Jobs Institute can help small businesses set up the survey and provide a template to analyze your data for free. You can have all your employees take the assessment and reflect together on where you can grow as a business.

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PARTNER WITH FIDELIS GOOD JOBS, GOOD BUSINESS

Partner With FIDELIS Good Jobs, Good Business
Across the U.S., levels of income and wealth inequality continue to climb and almost half of American workers remain stuck in low-wage jobs with little opportunity for advancement. In addition, the number of small businesses has reached all-time lows, and race and where you're born remain some of the biggest factors influencing financial success in life.

At Fidelis Capital Group, we're focused on supporting small businesses and mission-driven investors to create jobs in underserved communities " but creating jobs alone is not enough to combat inequality and all of these other troubling trends. We know that business owners want to provide really good jobs for workers, but aren't always sure how to raise wages, offer health benefits, or better engage their workers in ways that also make sense for their budget and bottom line. Good Jobs, Good Business is a first-of-its-kind free tool for small business owners to do right for their workers while also growing their business and boosting their profits.

the FIDELIS Good Jobs, Good Business toolkit reflects our commitment to creating practical resources that can be used by small businesses and organizations that work with small businesses to advance good jobs and create stronger communities from the bottom. However, we can't achieve this vision alone. If you're a CDFI, workforce development organization, investment fund, government agency, or another type of organization working with small businesses and are interested in integrating Good Jobs, Good Business into your work we'd love to hear from you and discuss how we can support you in your efforts.

Contact Us
the FIDELIS Good Jobs, Good Business Model The incorporation of job quality as part of the deployment of capital in our communities has many benefits. Improving job quality for workers can help businesses in achieving better financial results and have a ripple effect on local economic growth. At the same time, we can't expect business owners to shoulder the costs and responsibility of improving job quality without providing them with tools and free advising on how to do it.

Whether it's worker retention, rising minimum wages, offering health or retirement benefits, or engaging employees " small business owners know what their biggest challenges are. We created the toolkit to remove the guesswork from the "how to" of creating good jobs in ways that strengthen small businesses. Good Jobs, Good Business provides step-by-step guidance through six key areas:

Employee Compensation
Health Benefits
Retirement Benefits and Other Wealth-Building Strategies
Scheduling, Vacation, and Paid Leave
Hiring, Training, and Professional Development
Employee Engagement
Each section has detailed advice, workbooks, and stories and advice from fellow small business owners on how they implemented a "good jobs" element and how it helped their company. PCV also offers additional good jobs support through our Small Business Mentoring platform, FidelisCapitalGroup.com. PCV's Business Advising platform can match each small business utilizing the toolkit with an advisor to support the business owner in taking steps to create better jobs that are good for their business and good for their workers.

If you're interested in using the FIDELIS Good Jobs, Good Business model as part of your own work, contact us today to learn more. ..click here>>