The Influence of Work Environments on Employee Attraction

Abstract

Companies need a competitive advantage within the ‘war for talent’ in order to attract their employee target group. Now the amount of jobs and job vacancies keeps growing, companies started a battle to attract talented knowledge workers to gain the best organisational market position in the current knowledge-driven economy. There is assumed that work environments can be used strategically to attract employees, wherefore companies invest in their work environments. However, it has not been proven that work environments –involving characteristics on location, service & facilities, building, and workplace level– may lead to increased employee attraction. Therefore the main research question is: “What is the influence of work environments on attracting employees to enhance competitive advantage within the war for talent?”. A literature review in combination with structured interviews and an online survey resulted in information on the influence that work environment characteristics have on the attraction of knowledge workers. The data on the influence of work environment characteristics is generated by implementing the value tree method in combination with the constant sum method within the survey. Subsequently, the data is statistically analysed in SPSS by mainly using a Repeated Measures ANOVA in combination with a Paired Samples T-Test or a Games-Howell Test. From the results can be concluded that the work environment is comparable influential as other, more general, employee attraction factors, but is not perceived as one of the most influential factors. Mainly the location-related factors, geographical location and accessibility, appeared to be high influential on people’s choice for a job. In addition, significant differences between groups from different socio-demographic perspectives were found for almost all tested variables. Remarkable is that no significant differences were found between groups on the value that the influence of the work environment perceived when comparing to the general employee attraction factors. This indicates that there can be assumed that the survey respondents have a comparable opinion on the influence of the work environment on their choice for a new job. Besides, 74% of the respondents indicated that they are willing to give up a certain percentage of their (future) salary in exchange for their ideal work environment. However, as most of the variables did indicate significant mean differences concerning their influence of the work environment characteristics between different groups, the ideal work environment is different for each (socio-demographic) group and even for each individual. The advice for companies is to define their target group and link their target group to the employee profiles as presented in this thesis in order to increase the chance of attracting their employee target group, and thereby enhancing their competitive advantage within the ‘war for talent’.