Tips To Retain Top Talent
As we continue to navigate through some lingering impacts of the changing landscape of the Australian workforce, it is clear that employee engagement is a fundamental element to attracting and retaining top talent. Each employee embraces their own unique blend of purpose, values and motivations, and understanding what truly drives them should not be a cursory activity or afterthought.
Insights from Culture Amp, show that 70% of Australian employees report being engaged, while Clicks’ latest IT Workforce Insights Report data shows that Flexible Working Conditions and Training & Professional Development top the chart of initiatives that employees seek out for a happy workplace.
Fostering a workplace where everyone feels connected and valued is key to retaining your best talent, maximising productivity and minimising turnover, resulting in a and a healthy and robust company culture.
Follow our practical strategies to enhance or improve your employee engagement and create a thriving, energised workforce that will be driven to achieve.
Preboarding and Onboarding
Engagement begins to build from the moment your new hire verbally accepts your offer of employment. Maintaining contact before their commencement date and while they are working helps to keep your new hire engaged and excited about their new role. It will also give them an opportunity to learn new information about their new company, team and job.
During the first week for new starters at Clicks we schedule in some lunch dates with different teams. This helps to familiarise themselves with their new colleagues and can short-circuit the ‘getting to know you’ nerves. Feeling more relaxed and comfortable also helps people get up to speed with their work requirements more quickly, making them optimally productive in less time.
Vision, Values and Validation
Does your organisation have a company vision? A set of values? Are they visible?
Your vision and values should play a big part in your internal communication and be the driver of your employee and company outcomes. If the vision is aspirational and achievable, it can motivate your employees and teams to deliver reliable outcomes and acts as a unifying goal that fosters a culture of teamwork and collaboration.
Your company values should resonate with your people and underpin how you achieve success.
Clicks’ values are Teamwork, Openness, Care and Achievement. They aren’t just words. These values form the basis of our growth, success, culture in an environment where our people thrive by being their authentic selves.
We validate this by acknowledging and rewarding with monthly prizes to team members who have displayed our values in the workplace.
Recognition
Appropriately recognising staff is essential to maintaining or boosting employee engagement. What you choose to recognise may include teamwork, workplace kindness, sales performance, effort towards goals or project milestones, extra-curricular contributions, and learning from past experiences. Whatever you choose, it’s important that it is aligned to your corporate values and over-arching vision.
If you do regular staff engagement surveys, it will be extra impactful to align the form of recognition to things that you know are important to your people. It may be as simple as a personal visit or call from the business leader to say thank you, and describe the positive impact of their efforts.
Feedback & Communication
Engagement is a two-way street. When employees feel seen and heard, they know their opinions and feedback matters. When this is backed up by positive action, then that’s the secret sauce to having a fully engaged employee and they are more likely to feel like a valued part of the organisation.
Encouraging open communication helps your employees empowered. Incorporate
feedback into your strategic direction, projects and processes
At Clicks, we conduct an annual Employee Engagement survey followed by a
regular ‘pulse check’ during the year via a Wellness survey. Transparency is key.
We communicate the feedback openly an all-staff meeting sharing results and
outlining actions we will take. We also provide regular progress updates and
continue to check in with staff to assess the impact of the changes to adjust
our approach if needed.
Team Activities
Create opportunities for shared experiences. Research shows that positive work cultures are more productive, and create a better environment for collaboration when you have positive connections. Doing something that has a positive impact in the community can also boost morale. Volunteering increases wellbeing and happiness among other benefits. This means your team activity is already off to a good start – just ensure you pick something that resonates with the team.
Flexible Hours
Whether it’s knocking off early on a Friday, starting later on a Monday, or having a half a day off work, time and flexibility is something many of us value. They key is flexibility. Everyone has different schedules and outside priorities, so working with individual employees to find out how they work best can help them to bring their best selves to work.
You will find that is can be push here, pull there and most engaged employees will put in extra time when required. Providing them with flexibility creates a trusting and respectful workplace relationship. Having extra time off work on the company is not only a reward and recognition initiative that employees love, it can also boost their productivity and creativity and help them return to work more engaged.
Offer Careers, Not Jobs
Ensuring your employees are offered proper training and
resources to perform their job effectively is essential. Empowerment requires a
certain level of trust, and providing adequate training for employees bolsters
their confidence in their abilities to execute well on their work.
Upskilling your employees and providing a career progression path ensures they
grow with you and within the organisation, rather than jump ship for their next
career move. Prioritise promoting from within, so as your employees
develop, opportunities for advancement are always within their reach.
Food for Thought
For many, free food is a reward in itself. Often, by providing lunch or tea time in the breakout room, you also create an opportunity for the team to take a pause from work and connect with each other.
Sharing a meal together is such a positive experience and can often be the place where great working relationships and ideas are born.
Choice of Reward
It is important to recognise that different people appreciate different things. We recommend providing options for team members to select from – as much as is practicable – when considering rewards and incentives. This shifts the reward from being tokenistic to something that is valued by each team member. They may choose a voucher, a range of pre-selected prizes, or a donation to a charity of choice. Get creative. Ask your team for ideas.
Remuneration, however is the key reward in the workplace. Knowing they are being paid fairly and adequately also improves staff engagement. Consider communicating salary benchmarking data used to inform pay decisions. You can keep up to date with the latest salary data to ensure your staff is appropriately compensated for their work.
It Matters
Your people are your power.
Keeping employees engaged positively engaged has a direct impact on profit, productivity, sales, and customer ratings.
Disengaged employees leads to increased turnover and absenteeism, and can have a tangible negative effect on your business and the customer experience. As demand for talent increases, it is important that people are inspired to stay and motivated to perform.
