I’ve had these two tabs open for a while and decided to just share things that jumped out at me. I’m passionate about organizational culture, employee satisfaction, employee performance, retention, etc. Some of these things are really hard to understand, or even define in your organization. Each of these concepts could have a significant impact on your top and bottom lines. Whether you are a for-profit organization that centers your KPIs and organizational objectives around financial results or not, these things will help or hurt what you are trying to do.
Effective Employee Retention Strategies
This blog post from Robert Half popped up in a search I was doing on employee retention and I liked it. Short and to the point, with tactical ideas you could implement, or at least talk about with your leadership team.
The author starts with one of the first big impressions a new employee has: onboarding and orientation. I’ve experienced various onboarding models… when I worked for the federal government I remember being in a dimly lit conference room for three days filling out forms and being instructed on the millions of rules.
Later, as the first hire in a new department at a company that never thought about hiring someone like me (their first internal IT hire) I was told my office would be ready in two weeks and to just find an empty cubicle and, I think, order my own laptop (I was the IT manager, after all!). Another job I took had a formal onboarding process for the first couple of hours followed by a lunch with my new team to have a casual get-to-know-you first meeting.
I remember hearing about a colleague’s wife who went to work at a nicer retail chain. He was blown away at the amazing, thorough, welcoming onboarding she had. He didn’t go through it but he learned from her how a big company does amazing onboarding. It left an impression on her.
I have to say, a planned and on purpose onboarding experience is much better than “oh, you are two weeks earlier than we thought you would be… just hang out for a while!” That first impression will shape the first stressful weeks of learning the job, settling into the team, etc. There’s something about thinking through the details of the onboarding experience.
NOTE: I said onboarding was “one of the first big impressions a new employee has.” Before they are an employee, they’ll have formed an opinion of the company based on the hiring process. Of course, the person hired will have a more favorable impression than the people not hired, but everyone will be impacted by time to respond, being ghosted, the thoroughness of any communication, etc.
In the Robert Half article they go on to talk about mentorship programs, which are can be great. I remember my first mentor in the workplace was super excited to be given the job to mentor me. He liked… how shall I say… the power of being the mentor.
In my next role I was given a mentor, a software engineer, who made it very clear to our boss that he had no interest in, or intention of, mentoring me. He told her that, in no uncertain terms, in her cubicle. Coincidentally I was on the other side of her cubicle and couldn’t help but overhear the reasons why he didn’t want to mentor me (or anyone). Talk about awkward. If mentoring is done right, it could be a great way to keep and train the right employees.
Employee compensation is a no-brainer. You have to be competitive. If employees can go elsewhere for a lot more than you are paying, you’ll probably have some retention issues, which has real costs (and is a pain). The author talks about perks (which can be misleading and a little bait-and-switch), wellness programs and a culture of wellness, having good communication, annual performance reviews (you should think about doing formal reviews more frequently, and spending time in one-on-ones), and having real training and development opportunities.
Employee Recognition and Reward Systems
This is number nine on the Robert Half post but I wanted to break it out because it is one of the core competencies of Snowfly. If you don’t have an employee recognition and reward system you might be amazed at what a program like this could do to help your retention and culture. We’ve seen effective programs that cost nothing. We’ve seen effective programs where the companies invest a lot of money.
Don’t worry that employee recognition has to be a costly line item. We can work within your budget and leverage what we’ve learned about effective recognition and reward systems to help you have the best program for your organization.
Seriously, let’s get on a call and talk about your unique situation.
Other Employee Retention Tactics
In the blog post they talk about other employee recognition tactics, including establishing a culture of work-life balance, allowing flexible working arrangements (COVID influenced this in many companies in 2020), helping employees deal with change, which is inevitable, creating a culture with powerful teams, and acknowledging milestones.
Snowfly can help with many of the fourteen tactics in the Robert Half post. Want to acknowledge milestones? Easy with Snowfly. Want to have an employee recognition system? In Snowfly we make it easy for peers and managers to recognize a variety of noteworthy things (efforts, accomplishments, successful customer encounters, etc.).
Want to help with training or dealing with change? Snowfly has tools that help disseminate information, incentivize your team for reading/watching the information, and even testing or verifying that they understood the information. Of course, that is tied into the incentive program so you can incentivize everyone for going through a new training.
Because part of Snowfly’s core system is delivering employee incentives, whether that means a reloadable debit card or an Amazon gift card or payment to a paycheck, we can also help with various aspects of employee compensation. If you have SPIFs, variable pay models, or other special ways of giving extrinsic rewards, we can help automate it. Automated delivery of extrinsic rewards builds confidence from employees.
Instant rewards help them feel appreciated and recognized for what they have done, in the moment, which is an important aspect of employee incentives.
Oh yeah… we started with onboarding. We have customers who use the training and incentives tools to help with onboarding employees. Not only does this help give a pleasant, automated onboarding experience, it introduces new employees to the Snowfly tools that they’ll use to recognize others and redeem rewards.
Employee Satisfaction Results in Employee Retention
All of these tactics, which can result in employee retention, are geared towards creating an environment where your team wants to work. Employee satisfaction leads to increased employee performance, a stronger culture, all that good stuff. People will just want to work for and with you. People enjoy what they do. They feel like they are doing a job that matters. They like who they work with. They talk positively about your organization, which expands the employer brand, potentially decreasing hiring costs.
If this talk about employee retention sounds exciting let’s get on a call.
