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Retain Your Employees for Longer

March 12, 2020/0 Comments/in Managing Your People /by StrategyDriven

When you’ve taken a lot of time and effort to find and recruit the best employees for your business, it can be pretty upsetting when they decide to leave, not least because you’ll have to go through the whole process again and that can cost your business dearly in terms of time and money.

That’s why it’s always a good idea to be proactive and do everything you can to retain your employees for as long as possible. With that in mind, here are some of the best techniques for keeping your employees for longer…

Give them more responsibility

Giving your employees more responsibility is a great way of showing your trust in them. It also gives them more autonomy over their working days, which can lead to a greater level of job satisfaction. If you’ve hired the best people, there’s no reason to loom over them – just leave them to it.

Respect them

Employees are unlikely to stay with a job when they feel disrespected and underappreciated. That’s why it’s so important that you show them respect at all times. Don’t talk down to them, talk with them and make them feel that their opinion matters because actually it does.

Give them development opportunities

Whether you sponsor them to upgrade their contractors license or let them attend college once a week to learn code, for example, investing your time and money in your employees’ learning and development is a great way to keep them engaged. It shows them not only that you care, but also that they will be able to grow and progress within your company instead of having to look elsewhere for career fulfillment.

Share revenue with them

This may not be possible depending on the structure of your business and various other factors, but if you are able, you may want to consider setting up a revenue sharing scheme whereby a percentage of your profits will go back to your employees. There is no better way of showing your appreciation, motivating your staff and keeping them onboard than rewarding them financially for their loyalty, and this is a great way of doing that.

Give them lots of time off

Nobody wants to work for a company that works them to death, and anyway, employees who are forced to work long hard hours don’t exactly perform as well as they could, so be that generous boss. Be the boss who knows how important rest and relaxation is and offer a generous amount of paid time off for vacations, sickness, the birth of a new baby, mental health days. It might sound expensive, but it’ll cost you less than unmotivated employees or having to recruit new staff because your existing employees are burnt out.

If you want your employees to stay with your business for the long haul, you need to put the effort in. No one is going to stay in a place where they are overworked and underappreciated for long, so take you5r commitment to the good staff you have seriously starting now.

Employee Benefits: What You Should Know As An Employer

November 20, 2019/0 Comments/in Talent Management /by StrategyDriven

As an employer, one of the smartest things you can do is offer employee benefits in the workplace. Some employee benefits are pretty self explanatory and should come as a standard – such as water, tea, and coffee. Your team shouldn’t have to bring in their own basic refreshments.

However, you should offer more than the bare minimum. You want your workplace to be set apart from others, and your benefits to be a little competitive at least. Benefits vary from company to company, but they can easily make your workplace a more pleasant place to work for your team. Below, we’ll go into more detail on employee benefits and what you should know as an employer:

The Types Of Benefits You Can Offer

There are all kinds of benefits you could offer as an employer. This may include:

Health insurance (required to be offered by larger companies)
Dental insurance
Vision care
Life insurance
Paid vacation leave
Personal leave
Sick leave
Fitness

There are many optional benefits, and many companies offer the above simply to stay competitive. Extra bonuses, such as stock options, can also be a nice addition.

Employee Retention

Many employers are deciding to increase the use of bonuses, perks, and incentives to recruit and retain employees. Making the workplace more comfortable with benefits can ensure employees stay loyal and stick around in the long term. While you need to stick to a budget and you can’t be frivolous with spending, having benefits, bonuses, and perks that keep your employees happy will ensure more productivity, higher quality work, a more pleasant work environment, and more.

Creating A Nice Work Environment

While the benefits can help to contribute to a nicer work environment, they’re not going to do all of the work for you. Having Payroll HR in place will ensure your employees are paid on time and that everything is kept above board, which should be another concern of yours.

Setting Up Flexible Spending Accounts

Many employers set up flexible spending accounts, and these accounts are regulated by the government. The accounts allow you to set aside pretax dollars, and these dollars pay for things like daycare and medical expenses. They will decrease your taxable income as well as give more freedom to your team, so you should take advantage of one if possible.

Caring About Your Employees

Of course, providing benefits gives you the opportunity to actually make things better for your employees. The benefits should come from a genuine place of wanting to help them and caring for their wellbeing. An employer that shows they care will always stand out from the rest, and your team will be far more likely to stay loyal to you. Even offering things like verbal praise and support can go a long way to making the work environment nicer for them and encouraging them to keep going.

Many employee benefits are not compulsory, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t offer them. Wanting the best for your employees will go a long way. And that includes oral care for your employees with reputable dentists like the Dentist In Grand Blanc.

4 Ways Reduce Employee Turnover

July 29, 2019/0 Comments/in Talent Management /by StrategyDriven

Many organizations experience employee turnover. Replacing competent and experienced employees is a challenge for many companies. Most of them struggle to retain their staff. New Jersey businesses can give their employees annual leaves to rest. They can visit the Resorts Casino during weekends to get an online welcome offer. It helps them relax their minds and improve their productivity at work. Employers can minimize employee turnover in different ways.

Give Competitive Wages and Benefits

Everyone has basic needs such as food and housing. Most employees try to earn extra benefits to increase their savings. An employee might leave your organization if you offer low wages. It is prudent to research the current wages which similar businesses offer to determine the right salary for your wages. For example, Colorado tech-firms offers similar benefits to their IT specialists. Offer competitive benefits to retain experienced staff.

Appreciate your Employees

Most organizations encourage and recognize hard-working employees. It motivates them to perform their roles diligently. For instance, you can congratulate a certain department once they complete a difficult project. However, it isn’t necessary to compliment them at all times. Instead, it is prudent to create a friendly environment to make your staff feel acknowledged and appreciated. You can make annual performance analysis to promote devoted staff.

Project a Career Path for Your Employees

Many workers apply for jobs in other companies when they stagnate in a certain position for long. They strive to increase their knowledge and expertise in a certain field. Show your staff a clear career path to instill a sense of purpose and direction in them. You can change an employee to a higher position or another department to hone their skills. Nevertheless, it is important to inform your employees before you switch their positions.

Set Flexible Work Schedules

Create flexible work schedules for your employees to allow them to adjust their location and work plan. Everyone needs a work-life balance to remain healthy and productive. Flexible schedules allow employees to spend adequate time with family and friends. However, some organizations have strict work schedules. They have fixed work hours which all workers must adhere to.

The current job market is highly competitive. Companies with high employee turnover experience numerous financial constraints. They spend a lot of time and money recruiting and training new staff. Organizations can offer flexible work plans and benefits to minimize employee turnover. Also, they can assign new roles to employees to help them advance their careers.

Your Bad Leaders Are Driving Away Good Employees

June 15, 2019/0 Comments/in Business Politics Impacts, Talent Management /by StrategyDriven

These days, it’s hard to keep a good employee in your ranks. Messages across the web tell young workers that the only way to get ahead is to hop positions frequently, even as much as once per year. In the modern job market, frequent relocations seems to be how employees get the titles, responsibilities and perks they crave.

So, employees are already poised to leave — and they will flee your offices even faster if your leadership isn’t up to snuff. Here are a few ways bad leaders negatively impact your employee retention and what you can do to stop it.

Poor Communication

Good communication is the number-one requirement for a leader. After all, it’s impossible to lead if you don’t know how to use words to direct your workforce. Still, many poor communicators make it to leadership positions, and from there, they wreak all sorts of havoc. Poor communication can take many forms:

Over-inflated — using too much jargon, too many big words or overly convoluted sentence structure
Non-specific — failing to provide clear instructions or guidelines for a project or situation
Abrasive — communicating with aggressive language and/or with anger
Selfish — communicating only to seek personal benefits, ignoring others’ needs or desires
Wrong method — employing an inappropriate means of communication

Fortunately, communication is a skill like any other, which means it is possible to retrain these leaders to improve their performance. It might be wise to encourage leaders to develop their communication through advanced education, like an MBA program, or else through mentorship or coaching.

Criticism

There is a fine line between healthy feedback and destructive criticism — and many leaders stray to the wrong side too often. Leaders are meant to coach, helping employees improve their skills and thus develop their careers. Bad leaders will nit-pick, taking every chance to degrade employees and make them feel ineffective and worthless.

Many employees become so downtrodden by the constant criticism that they do not report the bad behavior to HR or higher bosses, which means it is often difficult to identify overly critical leaders. If you receive any reports of an unsympathetic, judgmental leader, you should take them seriously and take steps to effect change.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to retrain leaders who develop this habit. Often, it is a clear and simple sign that someone is poorly suited to leadership and should be removed to a different role. However, you might also need to undo the damage of these leaders by being overly appreciative of employee contributions, perhaps even handing out employee awards to raise general self-esteem.

Office Politics

Office politics is an unavoidable power and social networking system that develops in any organization, big or small. The manipulation of office politics by some employees is inevitable — but that doesn’t mean it’s okay for leaders to take advantage of the political atmosphere of an office. An overly political office often breeds fear amongst the workforce; fear causes employees to resent their employer, which drives up staff turnover.

Leaders might try to leverage office politics to encourage employees to work harder — but there is a delicate balance between positive and negative outcomes from political maneuvering. Plus, office politics always comes with ethical concerns, which certainly won’t boost your brand perception. It’s much safer to discourage leaders from inciting a political atmosphere in your workplace.

Dirty Laundry

Work only amounts to so much of a person’s life, and while it’s fine (even encouraged!) to share a bit of your home life with your coworkers, no one should be divulging unseemly personal drama in the workplace. Dirty laundry, much like office politics, breeds discomfort amongst your workforce; a proliferation of dirty laundry encourages people to spread rumors, with can reduce interpersonal trust and send employees looking for less threatening work.

Leaders need to find a balance between humanizing themselves with personal details and airing dirty laundry. Human resources can help train leaders who struggle to set boundaries. It’s also wise to build a workplace culture that allows for personal bonds between workers, so information about anyone’s personal life doesn’t seem quite so salacious.

Fear, discomfort, distrust — these are things that bad leaders can breed amongst your workforce, virtually guaranteeing that no good employee stays for longer than a few months. Your business can’t grow unless your workforce is stable and capable, which means you might need to take steps to change your leadership, stat.

3 steps to creating a culture that retains your best employees

February 6, 2019/0 Comments/in Corporate Cultures /by Karen J. Hewitt

Employees can do the minimum, or go the extra mile, and the difference between these two levels of performance, multiplied by the number of employees, can make or break a company. And when your employees are going the extra mile, it means they are engaged, and engaged employees don’t leave.

Losing employees is costly, especially if they are your best ones. Not only do they take specialist know-how and client relationships with them, but often straight to one of your competitors. And if you are operating in a context of skills shortages, which many companies are, you simply can’t afford to lose those skills you know are going to be impossible to replace.

The key to overcoming all of the above issues is culture, because as Peter Drucker famously said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Making sure your company culture is one that engages and retains your best employees is an ongoing endeavour, and there are three proactive steps you can take to build it:

1.Turn your company into a cause

Make sure you have a vision that is ambitious enough and inspirational enough to become a cause that employees rally around and makes them want to go the extra mile. Engagement for engagement sake will only ever bring short-term results; engagement around a cause, however, will keep your employees motivated for years.

Most companies have a vision, but with confusion rife around what a vision actually is, rarely do we find one with that essential emotional ingredient that makes employees put aside personal agendas for a collective one that appears much more attractive.

2. Set a minimum standard for people management

“People don’t quit companies, they quit their bosses”. How often have you heard this said? And how often on exit interviews do we find it to be true! This simple fact, disheartening as it might seem, is exactly the information we need to change our company culture.

By focusing on our people managers, and equipping them with the skills to better manage their relationships with their subordinates, we can minimise the loss of good employees because of bad management.

Giving feedback, for example, in a way that motivates rather than demotivates employees, is a skill in short supply among today’s line managers, but is something that can be easily taught and quickly put into practice.

3. Make Confidence a daily discussion

Confidence is discussed regularly in sports, because the sporting world knows that it is critical – that difference that makes a difference when athletes and sports people need to find that elusive next level of performance.

Confidence is multi-faceted and often misunderstood, but when discussed and worked on regularly, will make a huge difference not only to your employees’ performance but also their motivation. When employees are engaged, they will stay with your company, but you don’t just want them to stay, you want them to offer you their best performance possible. Confidence is the thing that moves them from commitment to action and gets them through turbulent times.

Creating a culture takes time, but results in a workplace where employees can give their best, making them feel good, and benefiting the company bottom line.

When you focus purely on Engagement, the tendency is to look to extrinsic and largely superficial motivations, such as gym memberships, extra holiday and shopping discounts, which only drive short-term results.

Investing in culture, however, addresses the more long-term and intrinsic drivers of human motivation – the need to grow as a person and make a difference – and sustainable Engagement, and employee retention, is the return that investment brings!

About the Author

Karen J. Hewitt, author of Employee Confidence: The New Rules of Engagement, is an Engagement and Culture Change specialist who is fluent in five languages. Her book is a finalist in the Leadership category of the Business Book Awards 2019.