Are you looking for strategies for retaining the best of the best in your workforce? These three items impact your organization’s ability to hire great employees and keep them: Hiring Practices, Transparency and Communication.
3 Ways To Improve Your Employee Retention Numbers
1. Evaluate The Equity of Your Hiring Practices
From an employee’s perspective, if they experience a fair and equitable interview, hiring, and onboarding process, they are more likely to stay. That initial impression of your company can either be the gateway into your company or a deterrent. So how can you do this? Make your HR team true partners in the process and provide ways for them to genuinely impact, and if needed, enact positive change. These professionals not only are well-educated and experienced professionals, but they can also be passionate ambassadors of your organization’s values. Remember, this is only a starting point. When you have actionable data, implementing the right change is what will impact your hiring and retention numbers.
2. Increase Transparency Across the Organization
Process
Nothing is more frustrating than processes that are kept in a silo, not well documented, or simply not followed. If you need teams to follow the process to a “T”, be willing to accept feedback on that process and change it from time to time. If you’d rather your teams use the process as a guide, but you don’t need them to follow it exactly, make sure there are adequate discussions and training on what that means. Providing training for your managers and showing them how to mentor their teams can be the most effective way to meet your goals in terms of process transparency.
Pay
With pay transparency laws already impacting regions of the country, there is even more importance on having a firm grasp of your company’s pay structure. Delve deep into the demographics of your company to uncover any discrepancies in gender and age. However unintentional, this one area can blow up in an organization’s face publicly if there are even hints of discrimination. This area can also be a way to differentiate yourself from your competition and if positioned well, can help you attract and retain top performers.
Performance
There are many ways to track and manage performance. While KPIs can be utilized effectively, in the untrained manager’s toolkit, can do more damage than good. Since there are so many ways to manage employee performance, and every company is different, it may be helpful to “start with the end in mind,” as Steven Covey said. Start with your retention goals and productivity. If one of those areas is not headed in the right direction, you may need to reevaluate how you are measuring performance. Productivity may be extremely high but your employee attrition is higher than average. This probably means that your performance metrics are either one, not set to the right numbers, or two you need to provide additional training, support, and guidance to your team.
3. Create Effective Communication Channels
Effective communication goes both ways and is most easily measured in dialogue. John Maxwell said that the greatest myth of communication is that it has taken place. Communication channels need to accommodate communication in both directions to make sure that the messages and information have been sent and received accurately. Perhaps this means more meetings. Maybe this means fewer meetings with fewer topics to cover. Perhaps technology can assist, however, the key is to be able to measure effective communication and its impact on the organization.
Summary
Like clockwork, our economy swings from a candidate market to an employer market with regularity. Companies who are able to attract and retain top talent during both times most likely have mastered these three areas: equitable hiring, transparency, and communication. Without these three components tightly aligned, employees won’t feel valued or feel that they are good fits for the company culture.
How Can Panther Help?
As a national staffing firm with over 30 years of industry experience, we are positioned to help you find the employees that you need whether you are looking for employees for direct-hire, temp-to-hire, or contract positions. We utilize our deep talent pool in the following areas to make sure you have access to employees whether you need one or need to staff a whole business unit.
If you’re looking for professional employees in the following areas, we welcome you to contact our team today to access our talent pools and recruiting expertise: Professional, Life Sciences, Engineering, Federal, Information Technology, Accounting & Finance.
Additionally, our workforce solutions may help you solve some of your biggest issues like payroll, employee misclassification, or large volumes of suppliers and billing processes.
Panther’s managed recruitment solutions centralize and streamline your numerous staffing functions – driving efficiency, profitability, and performance.
For MSP clients, we provide a full complement of managed staffing services and managed recruitment services designed to:
- Mitigate employment risks and ensure workforce compliance
- Simplify communication between hiring managers and staffing suppliers
- Handle all administrative tasks
- Establish performance metrics
- Source talent from various vendors
