In a talent-short market, keeping your best employees is essential for success. These may be your top performers, longest-serving, or most reliable team members. The people who make the real difference within your business or the ones who would make the most impact if you lost them to a competitor.
You may already know who these individuals are, but are you just hoping they will stay, or do you have a plan to keep your most capable employees from leaving the company?
From our experience, the top performing business we support demonstrate strong talent retention practices. Maintaining a reliable workforce, increased employee performance, and high staff morale. In this article, we explore the benefits of talent retention, and share a few ideas which may help reduce your staff turnover.
Create a Positive Working Environment
Creating a positive working environment is one of the most important aspects of talent retention. Providing a team environment and a safe workspace that is engaging, respectful, and supportive can be a major factor in keeping your team from looking elsewhere.
Establish a culture of providing praise, constructive feedback, and recognition when it is due. Invest in professional development opportunities that will help employees to grow and develop their skills.
Encourage better communication and involvement with your team by offering regular meetings, feedback sessions, and open-door policies. Open communication helps to ensure that employees feel heard, which can help to reduce employee turnover.
Remember, not every meeting needs to be done in an office. Embrace the opportunity to meet in a casual setting or fun activity. You may be surprised how productive a conversation can be in a more relaxed environment away from the spotlight of an office.
Provide competitive salaries and benefits.
It goes without saying that in order to retain talented employees, you need to offer competitive salaries and benefits in line with current market rates. Salary packages should also be accompanied by a variety of attractive benefits, such as flexible working, health plans, above average holiday allowances, and childcare options.
Creating a bonus system, offering additional compensation, extra holidays or company away days for meeting team or individual goals, can motivate employees to work hard and stay longer.
Offering flexible working arrangements
In today’s market, we increasingly see more focus on the overall package vs pure salary. With a better work/life balance becoming a key reason for considering a changing career. Some form of hybrid or home working is now commonplace in job offers. If you’re not offering some form of flexibility, you can guarantee your competitors will be in their bid to attract new talent.
Offering flexible arrangements through remote working, flexible scheduling, and creative breaks, enables employees to have more control over their own working environment, while also increasing their productivity.
Creative breaks, such as mindfulness programs, volunteer opportunities, and networking events, can provide a valuable break from the daily grind of office life.
Create opportunities for career advancement.
Firstly, it is important you have recruited the person with the right skillset and attitude for the role. Unsatisfied or mismatched hires create longer term issues for your business. This will only magnify if you promote an individual to a role they aren’t equipped for or interested in.
It’s therefore important to think about the individual and their needs - against what the role has to offer now and in the longer term.
For the ambitious, career growth opportunities are a great way to retain your talent. By offering internal promotions, you create a career path within your company and provide natural incentives to stay and develop their career with you. Instead of seeking a promotion elsewhere.
Management roles are typically natural progression for time served employees but be aware that talented individuals who lack leadership qualities often struggle and become demotivated. You may therefore want to consider a different path they can excel in. Or consider upskilling, introducing training courses tailored for developing required skills. We often hear jobseekers looking for a move due to incompetent managers.
Alternatively, increasing responsibilities which match skillsets is a great way to create more productive promotion opportunities which they will enjoy.
Offering mentorship programs and/or job rotations will also help employees grow in their own career ambitions, becoming future mentors and ambassadors.
Promote a positive company image.
When employees feel proud of the company they work for, they’re more likely to stay. It’s therefore beneficial to promote a positive company image. Encouraging employee engagement, celebrating achievements, engaging with the community and being socially responsible.
Activities, such as team-building exercises, lunch and learns, and happy hours, can help to foster stronger connections between you and your team. Celebrating successes with awards and recognition helps motivation and reasons to work hard and achieve more. And by engaging with the community, you build a positive reputation in the eyes of future recruits, clients and investors – whilst doing something which benefits more than just your profit margins.
Conclusion
We interview active job seekers on a daily basis and they all have their own individual motivations for a career change. For this reason, there is no “silver bullet” solution to guarantee you retain the best people in your business.
But, if you consider implementing these tips, you can reduce employee turnover, improve your working environment and create a positive company image.
Resulting in a more motivated, engaged and appreciated workforce who will be more prepared to work harder and grow their career with you.
Good luck!
Could your company benefit from some one-to-one advice and support with your recruitment and retention strategies – our recruitment partnering service offers the longer term solution you need.