Retaining Top Talent

28 June 2020

Retaining top talent can be a challenge for business’ all around the world.
As a recruiter, we see all sorts of reasons that people move on from seemingly great companies (luckily for us as it helps us stay in business ?).
I’ve been looking into why people leave and what you can do to help retain your best people!
The days of saying “hey we’ve got a beer fridge and ping-pong table” to keep people engaged are simply gone. In fact, I’m not even sure they ever arrived… retaining top talent is much more yet also oh-so-simple.

So what is it that most people want from their employer??

  • From everything I hear, it’s often about rewarding work. Something that makes your people want to get out of bed in the morning. Whilst I appreciate this is subjective, it’s down to the employer to find out what parts of the job their employees enjoy and try to give them as much opportunity as possible.

 

  • Development is key. People rarely want to “stand still” doing the same tasks day in day out. Having a clearly defined development plan (that is achievable) will almost certainly stop a vast amount of movement from your team. Most businesses fail to do this!

 

  • Some flexibility no matter what it is will also help people to see you understand their needs. This will differ depending on the type of business, however, you could flex on the hour’s people do, the ability to work remotely occasionally or perhaps the components of their job role…

 

  • Pay people proportionally! You don’t need to break the bank to retain top talent, however, make sure you do at LEAST yearly salary reviews. I hear it all too often that companies don’t want to pay market salary or rates because it will upset some people in the team who have been there 4 years without a pay rise in accordance to the market. Guess what? They’re likely to leave too!

 

  • Simple things can go a long way to show your staff you care. Ensuring that they are given health and well-being check-ups as well as having people they can talk to about their mental health can make all the difference. Think about it. The better their state of mind the more productive they are likely to be. It’s a win-win.

Overall there are lots of things you can do to help keep your staff, however, the key thing is really listening and understanding their individual needs. Sometimes you can’t give people what they need or want. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just time to part company as, like many relationships, peoples needs change over time!

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