Improving Employee Retention in a Candidate Driven Market

Having an employee retention strategy is always a priority for forward-thinking companies. Whether it be by improving your culture to keep employees happy or implementing more incentives, retaining employees has many benefits including reducing spend on recruiting replacements and boosting the morale of current staff members.?

By focusing on retaining employees in the long-term, employers can create a more successful strategy. With one-time bonuses, companies may be able to attract eager candidates, but they are unlikely to yield high performance or committed workers.

To put it simply: if someone is not happy where they work and would rather leave than stay, these incentives will only keep them around for as long as that bonus lasts, before leaving again after their time has expired. Companies really need to focus on hiring people who are passionate about what they do, and instilling the right culture. By creating such an environment with the right reasons for staying tied into company’s ethos, companies will see exponentially higher levels of retention from their staff members over time.?

?For companies, it is not always easy to distinguish between genuinely enthusiastic employees and those who are there simply because they need a job. In this blog we will explore some of the vital components to achieve a happy and motivated workforce.?

Culture

?As always, culture is key. For any employee, seeing their future selves with an organisation, and being aligned with their core values is incredibly important and instils a sense of ‘belonging’. When looking to improve and build a successful culture, investing in hiring processes and creating a recruitment strategy is beneficial, and ultimately works to identify the right people for your business.

Relationships

Next come relationships. Building and maintaining strong, professional relationships within the workplace are actually a huge contributor and play a big part in retaining employees. Not only is the number of direct links important in reducing employee turnover, but also your employees’ social networks. Providing opportunities for bonding at work and outside will show that you care about strengthening their bond with the company itself. The more connected they are to colleagues, employees are less likely to want to leave. Closely linked to culture, creating a balanced and respectful structure within teams and by embedding the practise of appreciation and recognition, a company will go a long way to enhancing an employee’s work experience.?

Onboarding

?Another area for companies to invest is in their onboarding process. New employees are eager to learn and impress when they start a new job. However, the process of onboarding can go wrong, often through seemingly insignificant frustrations around something as small as printing or what expectations are for the first month. The key to a successful onboarding process is capturing that enthusiasm and minimizing those challenges in order to avoid uncertainty or anxiety. Often new employees are walked through a paperwork session and put in front of a desktop, but by offering something more interactive and engaging organisations can create a process that's about integrating new hires into the company culture.??

Benefits

Next, by offering competitive advantages, such as benefits as well as career progression, employees are more likely to see a company as a long-term venture, as opposed to a ‘stepping-stone’ in their professional journey. If other companies offer similar benefits to your company, these are likely to be matched by your competitors, and often financial incentives also have no enduring competitive advantage and may cause people who only stay with you for the money to lose motivation if this is all they get from your company. Offering alternative benefits can help to make people want to stay with you rather than going elsewhere.

The Future

As mentioned before, Future View is incredibly important, especially for people seeking new challenges. This will look different from person to person, but people need to see a future at your company in order to stay and be motivated and productive. By giving your employees prospects, opportunities for promotion and such like, you are helping your staff create a long-term view of their working future, which ultimately can be the difference between retaining or losing your top talent.?

By addressing these elements, and by putting together and implementing a multi-faceted strategy not only to hire the right people, but to reduce turnover and retain existing talent, a company will be well on its way to solving what is arguably the most crucial element to a business’ success.?

To find out more about how we work to source and place top candidates in your field, get in touch with Tarn International today.?