With the economy doing so well there is not a lot of good hires desperately seeking work. In fact, we’ve seen an overall increase in the amount of poaching that companies are doing from their competitors already trained workforce. This is a problem in an organization that is facing retention difficulty.
Typically, a strong onboarding process will make sure that you understand within the first 90 days whether a new hire is going to be successful or not. If we don’t have that 90-day built-in checkup period on the relationship then it is a bit more difficult to tell whether someone will continue to our benefit or not, but typically the answer will reveal itself within the first three months.
If you have current employees that you’re struggling with or a current role that seems to not find the right person, I’d suggest trying some of these strategies that I have found are successful in building out a retention model to ensure job focus and commitment from your constituents.
1. Incentivized Exit Interviews and Reviews
Typically, an exit interview can be filled with non-descript responses. It’s from an employee who is checked out of their role and looking for change. To bypass the lack of initiative in helping our company grow, it’s important to create incentive for the exiting employee to offer honest and productive feedback.
We want to build a questionnaire that includes a mixture of thermometer questions that evaluates the core values we see in our organization and our proximity to successful implementation from their perspective. We must measure the success of the initiatives that we feel are important to both us and our business strategy; the measures that guarantee long-term success.
Amidst these thermometer questions we should have a variegated list of introspective, reflective, and organization-based response questions. We should know what they were looking at and experiencing that was distinctly outside of the expectations of an experience within our organization. This should be mentioned to your constituents after they finish their exit-interview; the incentive is provided upon completion of the exit survey and the hope is to create a role that guarantees the success for the next constituent.
2. Learning Lessons from Current Employees
If you have current employees who fit the criteria for a known mistake, then you should build out a strategy that guarantees a take-away from that employee. With our clients we use the Devine Inventory Assessment. This assessment can help us isolate the competencies that are related to where the employee is weak. A failing employee is our best training opportunity because there are no risks involved; we already know its not working—this minimizes the risk of coaching and helps us become better managers.
We use the Devine Inventory Assessment for hiring because of the same reason that would make it shine in this circumstance. It is an objective perspective of an individual fulfilling a role. They build the snapshot for us and we can use this objective snapshot to have a conversation about why things aren’t working, instead of consistently finding ourselves fighting the fires that are built because of repeated mistakes.
3. Challenge Yourself as a Coach
The individual responsible for mentoring and coaching employees—the manager—or yourself, should take this opportunity and build an inventory around the specific issues that the employee is facing and why those issues are building a collection of incidents. Being a coach is more nuanced than simply being in charge.
In order to help anyone grow, they have to discover the issues that they’re facing. We cannot force someone to recognize the underlying reason for the mistakes that they’re making. Coaching involves asking specific questions and knowledgeable questions. We aren’t doing an inquiry; however, we are controlling the path of discovery for our constituents in order to help them grow.
A great way to start this is to challenge yourself. Think through some of the issues related to your current hiring, onboarding, and offboarding issues, and ask yourself questions to develop a comprehensive understanding of the overall issue. Build a plan of action for tackling the issue and try and uncover what roadblocks you’ll have to deal with in order to successfully fill a void in your company.
4. Hiring Bonuses
If you’re having difficulty with retention, but you have a solid way of ensuring a good hire then build out a plan to offer hiring bonuses for the position you’re looking to fill, relative to the importance of it. This hiring bonus will be a tiered pay-out. The initial hiring may have a small share of the bonus, with a larger share released on the 90-day mark, and the largest share released on the full year mark.
A hiring bonus is a great way to make someone feel like they are a pivotal addition to a team and can drive their loyalty early on. Building that bonus into a conversation on expectations is a great way to build ownership and responsibility into an individual whose entering your organization.
5. Morale on a Regular Basis
When the economy is going well, as it is now, it is easy for the entirety of a company to feel high on morale. In fact, morale is naturally high when we’re experiencing success as a whole. The risk we run is when we hit roadblocks while morale is high, and we’re not prepared to deal with it because we’re not checking our expectations.
Checking expectations is not battling against optimism. You do not know what your team or constituents are going through and when things get tough in their lives, no matter how good the economy is, morale will be lower than usual and it will influence the entirety of the organization. Engaging in team training and communication training is a good way to build morale, but so is taking your organization out to a local event, hosting a potluck, or even just opening the door for the team to take a day or a night out on you with their family.
Your commitment to the morale of your team will determine the retention of the employees that you want to maintain and keep. Loyalty is built out of a reciprocated net of respect and reward. You can keep individuals responsible and manageable if you commit to helping them when they are down and keeping them up while they are feeling good.
If you have any questions or comments reach out to me at Jim.Stephens@sandler.com and let me know how I can help you and your organization find success here or remotely.
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