Challenges and Respect: How to Retain Talent in Tough Jobs

You’ve scheduled your grand re-opening, your company is ramping back up to full productivity, and you’re ready to move at full steam ahead. But what about your team? Whether you’re bringing back furloughed employees, or hiring a whole new workforce, the fact is simple: you can’t run your business without them.

Once you’ve got those workers, the question is: how do you plan to keep them? According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), turnover can cost up to 200% of the exit employee’s salary in productivity loss, training time, and other HR-related costs. Losing out on in-demand skills is also a possibility, and one that has been shown to have serious effects on the company’s bottom line.?

The challenge is even harder for employers with tough jobs to fill. Whether you need a night shift crew, a line-cook, or simply need employees to remain cool under the pressure of accuracy and tight deadlines, you always want the best candidates in those roles and you want them to stay.

But new research shows that the things that are hardest about many jobs -- for example, the difficulties of maintaining a night shift schedule, or the hard labour involved in construction work -- aren’t necessarily the things that encourage people to move on. In a 10,000 person study, LinkedIn identified four main reasons that people leave: Compensation, Career Advancement, Workplace Culture, and Challenges.

Compensation

Compensation seems like an obvious cause of employee dissatisfaction, but there’s more to it than money. Benefits, bonuses and transparency are all tools in the employer’s arsenal to improve their employees’ dedication to their work. If your top talent knows that you value their expertise and where they stand compared to their colleagues, they’ll be more likely to stay.?

Career Advancement

Career advancement is another aspect of working life that employees rate highly. It’s not possible in every hierarchy to move employees along as fast as they might hope to advance, but again, transparency is key to satisfaction. A clearly defined set of job expectations in a clearly defined organizational chart is key to making workers feel appreciated in any role. A role advertised as flexible will draw in employees who value flexibility in their time, whereas a more stable role with less chance of advancement will attract employees who value that reassurance.?

Workplace Culture

Workplace culture can seem like an easy excuse for employees dissatisfied with other aspects of a job, but with workers rating it as one of their top concerns, you can’t afford to let it slide by. Communication is key, and open lines of communication will help you to nip growing problems before they become major disasters, as well as providing an easy way to accept feedback on more positive aspects of the job, which you might want to feature in your future hiring. You can’t always change people’s minds, but going into the hiring process knowing what kind of environment you want to maintain can help keep workers satisfied.?

New Challenges

The final aspect of worker dissatisfaction is sometimes the hardest to tackle, but you can’t get by without providing challenges to your workers. These challenges must be specific to each role, but they provide the backbone for everything else an employee will do within your organization. If you don’t give your employees a chance to rise to the occasion, you’ll never see the best that they can do. This doesn’t mean assigning impossible tasks or having sky-high expectations on day one, but employees are quick to notice if you never acknowledge their growth and improvement, and one of the easiest ways to say that you see their efforts is to raise the bar.

In the end, it's all about communication. Employees want to be respected and communication is the best way to tell them that you see their work and hear their stories. If you can’t show them that? You won’t be able to hang on to the best of the best, and you’re going to need the best workers to keep pace in this new, post-COVID global economic boom.