Your company offers fair pay and a wide range of bonuses, yet you are somehow struggling to retain your top talent.
Fact is, 77 per cent of recent graduates stay at their first job for less than one year. Moreover, studies show that over 91% of employees leave their jobs for reasons other than the pay and the lack of perks – instead, defective communication, combined with minimal opportunities to grow are mostly at fault.
How to retain top talent in a highly competitive job market and which are the perks that currently appeal to the younger, highly skilled employees – let’s tackle the three top ways on how to make sure your staff stays put.
Encouraging Growth
Promoting a culture of growth – both personal and professional – is one of the easiest ways to make sure you keep your employees motivated; motivated to work at their best and to stay with you long-term. Growth covers many aspects: from proactive strategies designed to expand your business, development and leadership programs to hiring more tem members and promoting from within, everything matters.
Making sure to keep your employees updated regarding the range of development programs available to them is imperative – and that pertains to both training and education programs. Creating a program for recent college grads, for example, will help both you, the company, and the skilled youth in the long run, regardless if you opt for short-term leadership-oriented programs or long-term fellowships.
Many reputable companies go beyond the development programs and offer partial or even complete tuition reimbursement – and that conveys a brand identity where education and growth are valued. Others tend to get more personal, by offering small scholarships to single parents who have children in college – and gestures like these are the very foundation of creating a strong relationship with your top talent.
Following the same line of thought, some companies decide to publicly support on-going education and offer opportunities not only to their employees, but also to the public. A good example comes from the pearl jewellery niche: LA-based company The Pearl Source, which offers yearly scholarships to students studying at American universities in an effort to support personal growth and to encourage future talent.
Open Doors and Flexibility
One of the key aspects when aiming to capture the hearts of your staff is to listen. Listening to their needs and preferences and taking clear measures in order to nurture them. For the younger generations, the old model of cubicles, complete with personnel policies simply does not lead to the best productivity. And where productivity is lacking, so is your talent’s interest and desire to stay. And this is precisely the reason why more and more companies are now are opting for open-door policies and flexible work environments.
The younger generations are much more interested in their surroundings than the previous generations of workers – and that means that they derive their energy from said surroundings, from the atmosphere of their place of work. In addition, less rules is definitely more when it comes to dress codes, as Millennials prefer flexibility in all areas – and that includes schedule, work environment and the possibility of not sporting suits all day, every day.
It’s All in the Details
The big perks count, yes – and you simply couldn’t do without offering your staff opportunities to grow or without allowing them to be at their productive best. But fact is, the little perks (and there are myriads of them) are just as essential. It’s all in the details – and a successful employer is thinking of everything. From offering quarterly bonuses (like media and cable giant Comcast) instead of the predictable end-of-year hand-outs to creative strategies such as paying for a skilled worker’s vacation once they reach 10 years with the company, the opportunities to show your staff how much they matter are endless.
Offering lucrative stocks as part of the compensation is a new direction many forward-thinking companies are currently implementing. Companies like UiPath, Aflac and Pegasystems all offer their top talent multi-fold compensation packages which include stocks.
When it comes to benefits, it’s less the quantity that matters and more the quality. As one of the key elements in keeping your emplyees happy, benefits are no longer just about your basic healthcare packages and paid sick leave – they are thoughtful and personaized. Some copanies get really inovative when it comes to benefits – and a good example of that is Procter & Gamble, which gives its staff the ability to buy additional vacation hours up to the six-week mark.
But if you’re not a major enterprise and can’t afford the luxuries a company like P & G can afford, the good news is that even the smallest things matter: and those include simple gestures such as celebrating birthdayss, middday breasks, gift cards and staff appreciation days.
