How do you keep hold of your top talent?

Organisations - like yours - probably spend a lot of time, effort and above all money recruiting the best talent. Unfortunately, skilled, experienced, and qualified individuals who fit your company culture can be hard to find. There is a huge demand for top talent in the current job market, with most strong candidates receiving multiple job offers. So it’s more important than ever to make sure that once you’ve found the right person for the job, you keep hold of them.

 

With this in mind, here are five strategies which may help improve your staff retention:

 

Let’s take a step back. In order to improve employee retention, you need to start right at the beginning, with the application process itself; identify the exact role and culture-fit your company needs and seek out those candidates who fit the bill. How can you choose candidates that are more likely to stay? Longevity is a key factor here: an individual whose CV boasts of loyalty, perseverance, engagement - and fewer career moves - is a safer bet than a serial job-hopper.

 

If your company provides a clear path towards career progression - offering greater compensation and more responsibility further down the line - then employees will feel they are working towards a shared goal. This way, their personal career development will also play a crucial part in the success of the organisation. Training programs which help foster the acquisition of new skills, new tech and new processes - and of course prospects for promotion - will in turn make your employees feel invested in the company, giving them a powerful incentive to stay. Smaller companies may find it hard to keep up with the formal training, learning and development programmes available at larger firms, but this doesn’t mean that they can’t compete by offering appropriate resources, support and development opportunities to staff.

 

What does your remuneration and benefit package say about your attitude to your employees? If you want to improve staff retention, it’s essential to make sure that your staff are being properly rewarded for their efforts. Pivotal’s Media & Programmatic team have have seen the average salary increase when moving roles to be 17.5% [In Q1 2018]. If companies take an approach to reviewing their employee compensation packages, this may reduce the risk of unexpected resignations, the internal issues counter-offers can create and actually, this may mean individuals don’t consider all of the external opportunities within the market at all.” Why wait for another company to make your employees a better offer, when you can do it yourself? Other options include offering financial rewards for those employees who hit their targets or remain with the company for a predetermined time period. It’s also important for both employers and employees to be adaptable in the modern age: flexible work schedules, remote-working options and generous paid leave policies will go a long way toward showing your employees that they are valued.

 

One of the most spoken about topics within the industry over the recent years. Within a company culture there’s no denying that transparency - open communication between management and employees - can help foster a shared sense of purpose. When employees feel they can speak frankly with their managers, and that their input - whether that may be ideas, suggestions or complaints - will be heard, then staff retention will also improve.  What’s more, communication of the company vision to all staff is a powerful tool which helps to create a shared goal and engagement between management and employees at all levels.

 

We wouldn’t be fulfilling our role as a digital recruitment agency without mentioning the importance of data. Your HR department has plenty of data on your employees, old and new, but are they using it fully to identify who’s most likely to leave, why, and what steps can be taken to prevent the loss of good staff? Looking more closely at employee retention data can help uncover patterns and help you to identify and address these issues before they lead to staff attrition.

 

Industries are facing potential threats ranging from uncertainty surrounding Brexit to concerns about GDPR and data breaches, however this has not affected the volume of new opportunities available. In fact, our Media & Programmatic team has witnessed a 20% increase in available positions year-on-year. So clearly, retention and engagement strategies are more important than ever.

 

Whilst some degree of staff turnover is inevitable, if you can follow these tips to ensure that your employees feel respected and valued, whilst capitalising on new developments in technology which impact the recruiting, onboarding and everyday work life of your staff, then retention can be significantly improved.