Retaining Talent 101

Introduction

One of the great benefits of the Talent Mapping process is that it supports an effective, strategic hiring policy. It can also help with employee retention. Essentially, if you hire well, then, you lower the chances of high talent turnover.

The pandemic has provided the perfect demonstration of the importance of high-performing teams to an organisation’s success.

In the early weeks of the pandemic, IT departments played a critical role in ensuring that businesses were able to switch seamlessly to remote operating.

By performing so admirably during the time of crisis, these IT teams have highlighted a new challenge facing business – how to retain top talent.

Ways to retain top talent in the face of The Great Resignation

An unanticipated consequence of the pandemic has been the phenomenon known as The Great Resignation. According to Professor Anthony Klotz, this trend in job dissatisfaction has four principal causes –

– Employment uncertainty caused by the pandemic
– a high level of burnout among overworked employees
– ‘pandemic epiphanies’ – employees reflecting on their work/life values
– companies restructuring their work schedules in an unfavourable manner

What does The Great Resignation mean in raw statistical terms? According to TalentLMS and a Workable survey, 72% of professionals are thinking about quitting their job over the next 12 months.

Are they simply looking for more pay?

The research suggests not. Neither are they just looking for increased benefits. 58% of those surveyed said they were experiencing burnout, and 41% were discouraged by limited opportunities to progress their career with their current employer.

Other challenges included poor flexibility in working hours (40%), while 39% attributed toxic work environments to their desire to move on.

Clearly, organisations need to address the threat of losing people to The Great Resignation phenomenon. The time and cost of attracting new talent should be enough to persuade them to do all they can to retain the talent they have.

Here are five best practices for effective talent retention –

1. Evaluate your hiring process

We’re all familiar with the traditional hiring process:

• Post a job opening
• Wait for the CVs to come in
• Call candidates for (often multiple) interviews
• Give them a challenge to demonstrate their skills
• Days or even weeks later, extend an offer to your first choice – who then might well not accept
• Spend time and money onboarding and, sometimes, training

The answer to the challenge of retaining your talent begins with reimagining how the employee journey begins. When you first recruit new people, do your recruiting teams

• Carry out strategic market research and intelligence?
• talk to candidates about value – how their role contributes to the business, its customers and its employees?
• take a less formal approach by holding relaxed conversations on LinkedIn or remote conferencing?
• reduce the number of interview rounds and increase the quality of the questions asked?
• pay plenty of attention to considerate and thorough onboarding?

By treating candidates in this way from day one, they are more likely to ‘feel’ your positive and inclusive ethos and less likely to be looking at their employment as a mere stepping stone.

2. Focus on reskilling and upskilling

The best professionals are lifelong learners who love problem-solving, whether it’s how to integrate disparate applications or how to scale computing resources to handle more demanding workloads.

You need to acknowledge this and provide programs to further develop your employees –satisfy their hunger to learn.

3. Take employee engagement seriously

How motivated does your team feel? Are they connected to your organisation’s mission and purpose? Do your people feel they a part of a progressive and diverse team? Employee engagement can sometimes be difficult to measure, but you need to pay more attention to it than ever before.

In its 2021 Employee Experience survey, Willis Towers Watson concluded that 40% of firms believe the pandemic had a negative impact on employee engagement. The same study showed that 90% of those focused on fostering a strong employee experience were more likely to experience lower employee turnover than their peers.

4. Implement flexible and hybrid work policies

Online jobs platform, Dice, asked over 1,000 technology workers how they felt about working from home. The vast majority were fed up with spending their days in back offices and cubicles.

17% said they liked working in the office full-time, although the desire to be fully remote dropped during the pandemic from 41% to 29% in 2021.

Hybrid work options are clearly the most popular.

The answer is for you to be as flexible as you can and to involve workers in deciding on a hybrid balance that suits both parties.

5. Review compensation and benefits packages
Your budget for salaries and benefits is never unlimited. However, it’s always worthwhile to analyse industry benchmarks to make sure your salaries and benefits are at least competitive.