Is your company stuck in a vicious cycle when it comes to hiring new employees? Do employees leave after six months or a year citing the need to find something else? Is your company losing longtime employees due to changing job duties, changing wages or burnout?
If the answer to any of those questions is yes, your company isn’t alone. The hard truth is that people are opting to change jobs more than ever these days for a variety of reasons. A survey by Robert Half has shown that poor skills match is the top reason for failed hires. Additional factors include poor skills match and unclear performance objectives.
Though there’s always plenty of job candidates on the market, it seems like it’s becoming more and more difficult for companies to find good talent. As a result, it’s imperative that companies find ways to hang on the top notch talent they do have. Failure to do so can lead them back into that vicious hiring cycle where an HR executive search firm has to come in to help find a suitable replacement.
So what can companies do? Here are 10 tips to help companies retain employees:
- Make every day important: When a new employee is hired and joins the team, that doesn’t mean the hiring process has concluded. Companies need to ensure that new employees have a positive onboarding experience, so that they’re not looking elsewhere six months down the road. With the way business is moving, companies can’t wait forever for employees to get acclimated to their job. By giving them all the tools right away and give them a positive onboarding process, chances of retaining employees are better.
- Offer flexibility: With the way many companies do business these days, it’s not a hard and fast rule that employees new to work 9-to-5 in office cubicles. Many employees and, by extension, the companies they work for, can get just as much done by telecommuting or working with a more flexible schedule.
- Recognize employees: It’s estimated that 86% of companies with employee recognition programs cite an increase in worker happiness. Bottom line: everyone likes to occasionally be appreciated and thanked for the hard work they put in. Recognizing employees from the top talent on down the line is important to keep them motivated and engaged.
- Focus on professional development: There’s no doubt that top talent is good at what they do; that’s why they’re the top talent. But one way to keep top employees and avoid using the services of an HR executive search agency or search consultants is to encourage top talent to keep growing, to keep enhancing their skills. This will keep them engaged in their jobs and focused on doing what they can do better themselves for the company and for themselves.
- Be upfront about money: One thing no employee appreciates is a company that is wishy-washy about what employees earn i.e. telling a worker they’re going to earn one thing, but actually paying them another. To retain talent, everything they’re being compensated—from money to health benefits to other perks—needs to be detailed in an employment package. Companies also need to help employees understand their total compensation and value of their total benefits.
- Communicate often: A surefire way to avoid having to use HR executive search consultant is to communicate as often as possible. More often than not, one of the biggest sources of employee frustration is a lack of communication—either directly or through a chain of command. By making direct communication and allowing (and encouraging) feedback, companies can grow and learn and make employees feel that they matter.
- In-house promotion: Another easy way to have employees leave is to pass deserving employees over for promotion. HR executive search agencies play an important role in filling job vacancies, but by promoting from within it allows for career development and shows employees that it’s possible to get promoted for hard work.
By taking some or all of the steps mentioned above, companies can improve their chances of retaining top talent and avoid having to put in the groundwork to hire new faces.