08 Oct Retention: How to Make it Happen

A high-quality recruitment process is certainly a good start. But what’s next to make sure your talents are happy with staying at your company? Here are our suggestions:

• Create a culture of trust. Before being employees your resources are human beings. And human beings need to create strong relationships based on trust. A culture of trust helps people feel comfortable at work and motivated. It has been long studied that companies where distrust reigns have a short life.
  
  
• Recognize good performance. Talents who perform at their best deserve to be recognized and to get the credits they hardly work for. Recalling what we were mentioning above, human beings crave for satisfaction. Why not applauding and rewarding talents who help the company move forward with their great ideas and results? Know your people and pulse each one of them for their preferred mean of recognition. This will keep them motivated and willing to go the extra mile to increase their performance.
  
  
• Employee development. Each of us wants to grow and improve. So do your talents. Design clear career paths, educational and experiential trainings, interesting programs that match your people’s passion and your organization needs. Developing your talents means developing your company, and a company who does not develop and move forward will stop attracting talents and achieving its business goals.
  
  
• Regular employee satisfaction survey. We have talked about knowing your talents, what motivates them and how they feel. Create a survey that is regularly sent out to all resources and let them tell you how company culture is doing, and which levers you can use to add value to the current employee experience.
  
  
• Interview exit. It would be very unrealistic to think that nobody will ever leave your organization. When this happens, make sure the person is interviewed to understand what made her/him leave and choose another opportunity. This will allow you to prevent more exits to happen for the same reasons and therefore to improve your company culture.

Do all these actions ring a bell to you? What do they have in common? Positive leadership is the key.

On one hand an authoritative leader who wants to have complete control of everything and everyone will not help his employees grow and become independent. Also, dictating policies will not increase employee engagement. But promoting common decision making will. However, a laissez-faire leadership has different pitfalls.

A Leader who can balance delegating and controlling, positive and reinforcing feedback, strategy and care for his/her resources, taking risks and sharing decision making is definitely a leader who allows talent retention to happen. In fact – as we have seen – retention depends on company culture and the latter completely depends on the Leaders.

So Leaders, talent retention is in your hands. What’s your next action to increase it?

Gaia Urati