How to Attract and Retain the Best Employees
Your employees are at the heart of your business and are integral to its success. Recruiting the right employees for the job is essential to keep your business running efficiently, and for driving it forwards toward a profitable future.
Your team represent your business and are the face of your company. The first impressions that customers receive from your business will likely come from your employees. As a business owner, you need to ensure that you have employees that represent your business in the best way possible.
Recruiting the best staff is a difficult task. Even if a candidate has all the right skills and experience, it can be tricky to see how they will fit in with the rest of the team. Finding the best candidate for the job involves weighing up their qualifications and experience, along with how well they will complement your existing team.
Attracting the best candidates and then retaining them is crucial. The recruitment, onboarding and training process is both time-consuming and labour-intensive. It is far better to attract the best employees in the first place and then retain them. Continually needing to recruit new employees because you have a high staff turnover suggests that there are issues within your workplace that need to be addressed.
To attract the best applicants to jobs in your company, and then to ensure that you retain them requires a concerted effort. Many factors combine to create employee satisfaction, and these all need to be taken into account when managing your staff.
Career Development
Talented, ambitious recruits will need reassurance that there are opportunities for them to progress their careers within your business. Without scope to progress, employees will reach a point where they are ready to move on, and will likely do this by seeking employment elsewhere. Ensuring that you have opportunities for your team to progress within your business will help staff to feel motivated to perform at their best.
If no opportunities for progression exist, employees have less incentive to drive their performance and to exceed the basic requirements of their job role.
Continuous Training
Providing continuous training to employees serves two benefits. Firstly, employees will appreciate the opportunity to enhance their skills and learning. Secondly, your company will benefit as a result of the training that your employees receive when they put their newly developed skills into practice in the workplace.
Ongoing training demonstrates that you are invested in the continued success of your employees and ensures that every member of the team has the latest knowledge to perform their job to the best of their ability.
Incentives
Employee incentives are a useful way to attract candidates to apply for jobs in your organisation. However, to be successful, they need to be incentives that are a real benefit. Your staff need to value the incentives that you offer; otherwise, they are meaningless. For example, if you offer free drinks after work on a Friday as an incentive, this may receive a mixed response. Not everyone will see this as a perk, maybe they don’t drink, perhaps they don’t like socialising with work colleagues, or maybe they have other commitments. A better incentive that offers a tangible benefit to your staff would be to let everyone leave a couple of hours early on a Friday. Receiving time off each week is likely to be a far more popular perk.
Leadership
How many times have you heard friends and family members complain about their boss? Probably too many times to count! Having a manager with poor leadership skills can create a toxic environment in the workplace, and have a significant impact on both productivity levels and the workplace culture. When an ineffective manager is left to run a team, staff morale can suffer, and staff turnover levels can increase.
Managing a team is never an easy task. The weight of responsibility can be hard to deal with for some managers, whereas others may lack the appropriate people skills. The complexity of leadership is demonstrated by the sheer volume of books written on the subject. However, with the right leadership training, most managers can significantly improve their management skills. The results of the training can be felt throughout the team and can help make the work environment a much more pleasant place to be all-round.
People typically work harder for people that show them respect and appreciation. A successful manager can use their leadership skills to encourage a team to function at its best and achieve impressive results.
