They’ve signed the contract and you can’t wait for them to start. We all know that great employees are vital to the success of any business. Hiring the best can be a challenge but keeping them can be even harder. Having a proactive strategy to keep top talent engaged and motivated should be part of every organisation’s management plan. Nurturing employees begins with onboarding, but it never stops. Here’s five ways to keep the best for longer.
1. Get onboarding right
According to a KPMG report, while 50% of all hourly workers leave new jobs within the first four months of employment and 50% of external senior hires fail within the first 18 months, new employees who go through a structured onboarding program are 58% more likely to be with the organisation after three years.
The most forward-thinking corporates recognise this issue, and some of the best are already moving their onboarding beyond the top-down, traditional ‘day one’ download. Understanding the context of the experience for a new hire, and using content strategy coupled with technology can reduce anxiety to improve retention of information, but also empower, inspire and ultimately build confidence so the new hire is contributing from the get-go.
2. Go beyond onboarding
What about those employees who have been onboarded, and have been happily aligned with the organisation for those critical first 18 months? What do corporates do to maintain that connection?
Unless your company is L’Oreal which offers a full 2 year long onboarding process, the simple answer is ‘not enough’. Very few corporates have tools in place to retain and engage longer-serving employees. Yet there is much that can be done.
3. Show the path less trodden
It’s not unusual for the brightest and best members of a corporate workforce to turn up one day and unexpectedly hand in their notice. They announce a burning desire to shift from marketing to analytics, to live in Amsterdam for a year, or to open a popcorn stand, and that’s it – within a few weeks all their experience and skills are lost. It’s a major factor contributing to staff turnover in professional service businesses which can often be as high as 15-20% a year.
We have recently done some work with a global management consultancy to address precisely this issue. We helped them establish a tool allowing every member of the workforce to see and understand that non-traditional career paths are available to them within their current organisation. By creating complex algorithms, individuals are able to connect with other people in different parts of the organisation who can advise and mentor on these new career paths…and possibly even open a popcorn stand (yes, really).
4. Adapt your messages
We are living through a time of unprecedented generational diversity in the workplace. Internal communications teams need to be able to speak as effectively to Baby Boomers as they do to Millennials and the emerging Gen Z.
Messages that will resonate with one audience, keeping them within the organisation and delivering peak performance, will fall flat with another. It’s important to spend time getting to know the needs and wants of all employees. Understanding that a company shares their values and lifestyle needs is essential for Millennials, yet Boomers tend to be looking for more structured traditional interaction.
The best HR and internal comms teams are developing distinct messages for each which are then communicated with appropriate tone of voice and channels. Likewise, it’s worth bearing in mind that messages need to be adapted and presented in different formats if staff are office or field based, digitally connected, or not.
5. Make it fun
The best employees demand continuous professional development. Yet CPD still has laborious connotations and combined with a busy workforce, it’s something most employees still struggle to engage in. Lack of CPD dulls an organisation’s innovative edge, and contributes to the malaise that sees these high performers disengage and leave.
At one leading international professional services firm we were able to buck this trend, encouraging 90% of its senior leaders to engage with online learning within just six months. How? We turned it into a game.
We created an experience that pitted them against colleagues in a fun, humorous way, rewarding them with badges and trophies for levels completed, and showing them how they were performing against the firm average. For busy executives who were expecting another dreary off-the-shelf training module it was a surprise, and one they wanted to engage with.
Previously director-level professional development learning averaged just two hours a year. Our work led to a 90% participation rate, with those senior leaders using the tool ten times more than the project team had predicted. These are success metrics which few other corporates can afford to ignore.
