Five Strategies For Retaining Your Top Performers

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Staff Retention|Five Strategies For Retaining Your Top PerformersIt is hard to get ahead in the business world when you are constantly having to hire new staff. It is important that you are able to retain your top performers so that you can consistently perform, create harmony in the workplace and avoid the recruitment process which can be lengthy, stressful and expensive.

So, how do you retain your top workers? This can be a challenge particularly when you are a smaller business that may not be able to offer the same wages that they could command at one of the bigger brands in your industry. That is not to say that it is not possible, however, as there are a few highly effective strategies to try.

Flexible Working

The days of working Monday to Friday 9-5 are disappearing and it is important to recognize this as a business owner. You should offer your staff flexible working whether this is remote working opportunities or early starts/late finishes. This can boost morale, show that you trust and respect staff, and help with productivity levels.

Create The Right Office Environment

A job is much more than just a paycheck; it’s a place where people spend most of their week. Creating the right office environment ensures that people can feel happy, relaxed and focused each day which will help with workplace satisfaction. Here are a few tips to create the right environment:

  • Open plan and open door policy
  • High-quality equipment, furniture and tech
  • Allowing open communication
  • High-quality staff break room
  • Maximizing natural light
  • Plenty of plant life
  • Attractive office decor

Social Events

Leading on from this, it is also important to host regular staff social events. This can improve employee retention because it can help to develop chemistry between employees, as well as show that you appreciate your staff. You can throw more formal events, but you may find that it is the informal events which are most effective. These might include:

  • Afterwork drinks
  • Team lunches
  • Staff BBQ
  • Sport/exercise classes

Listen To Feedback

It is hard to retain your top performers if you are not listening to your employees nor taking notice of what they say. One of the best ways to do this is to employ satisfaction solutions like happy-or-not.com, which can help you to determine how happy your employees are and identify ways in which you can make improvements to boost morale.

Development

The best workers are the ones who want to progress in their careers, and so it is important that you allow them room to grow within your organization. This means that you should provide training opportunities and promotion from within, but you should also listen to their career goals and find ways to help them to achieve this within your business.

It is frustrating to lose your top workers to the bigger brands but this is unavoidable if you do not take action to retain employees. Even if you cannot match wages they could earn elsewhere, there are always ways in which you can keep hold of your top performers.

Safeguarding Your Employees: It’s A Business Necessity

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Safeguard your employees|Safeguarding Your Employees: It's A Business NecessityWhat are you doing to safeguard your employees?

Despite your busy schedule, you need to give them your priority. If you don’t, and if you fail in your duties in any way, then you are putting both your employees and your business at risk of harm.

The following are some of the reasons why employee safeguarding needs to be a necessity within your business.

#1: You will protect your reputation

By putting health and safety measures in place in your workplace, you are less likely to fall prey to employee compensation claims should an accident occur. And this doesn’t only apply in the workplace, as you should also adhere to drivers’ hours rules to protect those employees who spend much of their time on the road. In this instance, you would also protect yourself from compensation claims made by injured members of the public too.

Of course, it’s not only compensation claims that you need to worry about. Should your employees complain about you on social media, perhaps because you have neglected aspects of employee care within your business, then word is quickly going to spread. You are also in danger of ex-employees who might whistleblow to the media about any neglectful practices within your business.

And when your reputation takes a hit? Your business will take a financial hit in tandem.

#2: You will have more productive employees

As a business owner, you need to focus on boosting your employees’ health. As we discussed in the linked article, you can do this by keeping the office clean, giving your employees more time off, and by making regular health and safety checks.

And the healthier your employees are? The happier and more productive they will be, and that can only be good news for your business. So, take the appropriate steps to safeguard your employees’ health. Add in more break times, find ways to reduce the need for overtime, hire a cleaner if you need to, and raise morale to promote positive mental health at work. Your employees will then have the capacity to work harder and with more focus on quality, and they are less likely to fall ill and take time away from the workplace.

#3: You will retain your best employees

Why should your employees remain loyal to your business? If you are doing little to protect their physical and mental health, and if you don’t take their concerns seriously, then they have little reason to show loyalty to you. As these employee retention statistics suggest, the job marketplace is in the hands of the employee and not the employer, as staying in an unhealthy job does not have to be a long-term option. So, if you aren’t safeguarding your employees, you can’t expect them to stick around. Consequently, you might lose your best employees, and what’s worse, they might head to your nearest rivals.

So, protect your employees. Keep them safe in the workplace. Take action when they report concerns to you. And do what you can to keep them happy. You will be receiving their resignation notices if you don’t, and your business might suffer without them.

Take heed then and do what you can to safeguard your employees. While this is your moral and ethical duty, it’s also a business necessity, as you will experience hardship if you are neglectful.

4 Ways To Boost Employee Health In Your Business

As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to look after your employees. The happier they are, the more productive they’ll be, so everybody benefits if you treat your employees well. But one thing that a lot of business owners don’t put that much thought into is their employees’ health. If they are unhealthy, it impacts your business in a lot of different ways. They are more likely to take sick days and when they are at work, they won’t be as productive. If you offer health insurance, you will end up spending more money because your employees will need treatment more often. It’s for those reasons that employee health should be a priority in any business. These are some of the best ways that you can create a healthier office environment for everybody.

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Keep The Office Clean

A dirty office is not just unpleasant, but it’s also bad for people’s health. If the office is dirty then people will not be as productive because they don’t have a positive environment to work in. But they’re also more likely to get sick because they’re surrounded by bacteria all the time. So, you need to make sure that the office is always kept clean. Get a corporate office cleaning service to come in on a regular basis and give the office a deep clean, but your employees also need to take some responsibility. If everybody keeps their own desk area clean and people chip in to keep the communal areas tidy, it’s a lot easier to stay on top of.

Increase Natural Light

Natural light is important for good health because we need it to produce vitamin D. Unfortunately, vitamin D deficiencies are incredibly common because most people simply don’t spend enough time outside and they sit in a dark office all day, under artificial light. Lack of natural light can also have an impact on mood and productivity as well, so it’s important that you try to boost natural light in the office if possible.

Regular Health And Safety Checks

Health and safety can be a bit of a pain, but it’s there for a reason and it benefits your business in a lot of ways. If you ignore health and safety checks, you just increase the risk of injuries. When an employee gets injured, it’s bad news for you because they could sue you and even if they don’t, you will have to go without a good employee until they are well enough to work again. But that could all have been avoided if you just carried out some regular health and safety checks. And don’t forget to also remind your employees to go for regular check-ups with the dentist, like this Invisalign Dentist in Brentwood CA for example.

Give More Time Off

Stress and mental health issues are one of the biggest health problems that you have to tackle. If your employees are overworked, they will suffer from burnout and they may develop a more serious mental health problem. That’s why it’s important that you give people more time off so they have time to recharge their batteries. They will be more productive when they return to work, so even though they have more time off, their overall output will be increased.

These are all simple changes that you can make in your business to improve employee health.

The First Things You Must Do When Hiring Anyone

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Hiring |The First Things You Must Do When Hiring AnyoneFor most people in business, the whole prospect of hiring and firing is one of the most daunting aspects of running a business at all. If you find that you are worrying about this a little in your own business, then you will probably want to try and do whatever you can to make it a little easier, and that will generally mean coming to terms with what you are going to have to do about it. In particular, it’s useful to know what you are going to have to do when you are hiring someone, so that you can make sure that you do it in a way which is fair to all, useful for the business, legal and above board, and ultimately in a way which provides the best outcome for all. Clearly, that is something that might be very difficult to make sure of for many people, and it’s going to be a struggle.

However, in this post, we will aim to make this a little easier, primarily by focusing on some of the very first things that you should do when you are hiring absolutely anyone at all. As long as you are aware of these things, and you take them on board, you should find that you are going to be able to make much more of whoever you do hire, which is essential.

Check Their Right To Work

First of all, you need to concern yourself with some of the legal proceedings that you can’t ignore. One of the most important is checking that the person you are hiring actually has the legal right to work in the country in which you are operating. It is your legal duty to check that, and if you fail to then you could get in a lot of trouble indeed, especially if it turns out that they are not able to work there after all. It also helps to protect against any inherent or institutional racism, as you are going to need to make these checks on everyone, not just those you happen to know came to the country from abroad.

The issue and practical concern of how to check their right to work is actually very simple. In the case of those from abroad, you will need to check their visa allows work, and you’ll have to take a copy of it. For everyone else, simply take a copy of their ID – passport, driving licence, or official ID card. Get all this down, and you are going to be in a much better situation with the law.

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Hiring |The First Things You Must Do When Hiring AnyoneDraw Up A Contract

Of course, you are going to have to make sure that you and your new employee have an official agreement about what you should get from them, and what they can expect from you in return. This is the whole point of contracts, and you will need to make sure that you are working on drawing one up early on so that they can sign it when you take them on board. The contract should involve everything that is necessary to know about the position, and includes a description of basic tasks and responsibilities. It should also outline starting pay, and what chances there are for that increasing. You should also have a section there on the terms of dismissal, so that they know them from the very start and there can be no arguments about it later on. Many people find it troublesome drawing up contracts, but with Agiloft contract management software and a decent HR team in charge of the process, it should be considerably simpler indeed.

Training

In many cases, you will find that there is a need for training. If that is the case for your business and its employees, then this is something you are going to need to arrange straight away, before you actually have them sit at their desk and start working. It is useful and necessary for many reasons, but of course one of the main ones is that it is a reliable way of ensuring that they are going to do the work right. It will also help them to feel much more ready for the work, and mean that they can ease in more successfully, which is definitely something to think about too.

As long as you get all this right, you should find that you are going to be able to hire people much more successful indeed.

Talent Acquisition: 7 Ways to Make a Job Offer More Appealing

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Talent Acquisition|Talent Acquisition: 7 Ways to Make a Job Offer More AppealingThe average job seeker spends six months or more searching for a new job. The total number of job postings they read and applications they send in can be somewhat mind-boggling. It’s up to employers to make their job posting stand out to job seekers to ensure the best candidate is found.

The question is, how can that be done? Making sure a job positing is appealing to candidates isn’t impossible, but some tips may be needed. Keep reading for some tips on how to make any job posting more appealing.

1. Keep Things Simple

Mentor programs can help anyone find a quality job. However, not everyone uses these. As a result, it’s necessary to make sure job postings are simple and easy-to-understand.

To make job postings easy to read and understand, use bullet points, paragraph breaks, numbering, italics, and boldface when appropriate. Add the company logo to make the job description appear professional. Too much information is the fastest way to lose candidates.

2. A Concise Job Title

Create a job title that is easy to understand by job seekers. Adding a specific department or product in the title only confuses candidates and makes the description less searchable. Also, spell out any search acronyms to improve the searchability of the listing.

3. Get to the Point

It’s tempting to list all the details of a job to make sure the most qualified candidates are found. However, as stated above, keeping things simple is best. Choose five to seven duties and list those using bullet points for clarity. It may be a good idea to add one or two sentence descriptions of each point.

4. Benefits of Working for the Company

When trying to sell a position, include something appealing about the company. Is there something specific that’s awesome or unique about the company? If so, be sure to include it.

If a company is willing, add the salary range or specific salary for the position. Job seekers are also going to want to know about benefits. Make sure it’s clear why this job is important and needed. An individual wants to feel needed, and like they make a difference.

5. Clear Information and Location

Make sure to specify if the position is employee or freelance and if it is full-time or part-time. By adding this information to the listing, it’s going to help the posting stand out. Make sure the location of the job is clear, too.

If it is at the headquarters of the company, add the precise city and state. If there is a remote work opportunity, list where a candidate can work from.

6. Contact Information

If the position is posted on a job board, rather than a company website, this is especially important. Be sure to list the contact information or a link for candidates who are interested to apply with ease. Add a link for the company website or social media pages.

7. Post the Job in the Right Places

Posting a job in the right place’s matters. Use social media, job boards, and the company website to achieve the desired results.

Finding the Right Candidate

Finding the right candidate for an open position takes time and effort. Keep this in mind when creating a job posting. By using the tips here, a company can find a quality candidate that meets all the requirements of the job.