Hiring great employees and using engagement strategies

2. Recruit people with similar values

Instead of paying commissions, Cleary decided to invest more time hiring people with similar values who’d respond to intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation. By taking this approach, the commission his team members expect to earn elsewhere is built into their regular salary.

“The policy is a bit like an iron fist in a velvet glove,” he says. “If, after six or 12 months you’re not able to meet the requirements that come with the remuneration you’re receiving, the fit here isn’t strong and you probably need to work somewhere else.”

3. Allow your team to grow with your business

As opportunities to develop a career path is one of the most influential factors, Cleary made business growth a retention strategy. “When a business continues to invest in growth, people stay interested because they can develop with the organisation,” he says.

Expanding into global markets, Zinc now has offices in Australia, New Zealand, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia and the USA. “While we’ve been looking to exploit good growth opportunities for the business, this is also a way of holding on to people that we really don’t want to lose,” he continues.

However, growing the business isn’t a strategy Cleary plans to pursue indefinitely. “Zinc could probably be two or three times the size it is now but I’ve learned from past experience that it’s very difficult to maintain a monoculture in a $200 million organisation,” he says. “There may be a dominant culture but inevitably a number of subcultures will develop so the whole thing becomes much harder to manage.”

4. Introduce non-financial benefits

Cleary has also established the Zinc advantage program – an extensive list of non-financial benefits to increase employee engagement, motivate staff and consequently boost productivity at work.

The statutory four weeks’ holiday increases to six over a five-year period, team members get their birthday off, along with two days for anything needing to be done during work hours, such as visiting the dentist or attending a special event at their kid’s school. “People take those days off anyway so we’d rather give them a way of doing it legitimately,” he says. “Like any decent culture, ours is built on trust so we try to make it easy for people to do the right thing.”

Zinc also offers its team members many personal and professional development opportunities, good deals on everything from mortgages to mobile phones, and even free breakfasts. How does Cleary justify the cost? “We’ve saved a lot of money on recruitment and staff training, particularly retraining, and we’ve never had a Workcover claim so our premiums are relatively low,” he says.