How to Attract & Retail the Very Best People
How to Attract & Retail the Very Best People by Jim Sirbasku
While many employers complain about the difficulty of attracting and retaining quality people, other employers seem never to have this problem. What’s their secret? This article will provide you with ways to attract and retain the very best people. Whether you’re an executive, a manager or a team leader, the following information will be beneficial to you.
It’s not really a secret. Employers of Choice simply know what’s important to their employees.
Before you can consider the challenge of attracting and retaining people, you must look at the dark side. What drives people from their jobs? Profiles International recently completed a survey to explore this. Here are the five main reasons people change jobs:
1. Boredom
2. Inadequate Salary and Benefits
3. Limited Opportunities for Advancement
4. No Recognition
5. Unhappy with Management and the Way They Were Managed
Consider which of the five reasons you would address first, second, and so on, if you wanted to improve your company’s reputation as an Employer of Choice.
HOW DID YOU DO?
The study found that of the job-leavers surveyed:
- 30% were unhappy with management and the way they managed
- 25% felt they got no recognition for good work
- 20% complained of limited opportunities for advancement
- 15% cited inadequate salary and benefits
- 5% were bored with the job
- 5% cited other reasons (retirement, career change, sabbatical, travel).
So, if you want to attract and retain the people essential to your success, these are the key factors that you have to consider, and the priorities are abundantly clear. Money, for example, is important, but not nearly as important as most employers seem to believe.
Were you surprised with the rankings? Most employers are. The message is simple - if you want to attract and retain top people, these are the key items for consideration.
Follow these six steps and you are likely to become an Employer of Choice:
1. Evaluate Your Managers
People leave people, not jobs. Look at the results - 30 percent of people didn’t leave their jobs; they left their managers. Poor managers can cancel out all of the other good things you do to attract and retain the right people. Your human resources people sweat blood to bring in a sufficient number of the right people and, in 30 percent of cases, poor managers shred them and send them away before you’ve even recovered the cost of hiring them.
So what do you do? First, start measuring your staff turnover by manager. It will frighten but enlighten you. Until you know which managers are losing their people, you can’t do anything about it.
After you identify the managers who need help, help them! Review all of your managers in terms of their leadership and management skills. That’s how you will discover what these managers are doing to drive away good people. Provide training, coaching and support to struggling managers in a way that encourages productivity and retention. Good management is key to good retention.
2. Create a Recognition Culture
Insufficient recognition for their contributions is why 25 percent of all people leave their jobs. Fix this or learn to live with the attrition. Give managers the responsibility for seeking out the ways in which their people perform above and beyond. Have them consciously seek out opportunities for positive recognition. Create awards for exemplary performance and give everyone an opportunity to bask in the glow of positive recognition for a job well done. But be aware that a recognition culture cannot be created from nothing. It requires a healthy working environment to thrive.
3. Create a Healthy Work Environment
To encourage development of a genuine recognition culture, you’ll need to create a healthy work environment, one where providing recognition for exemplary performance seems normal. There are several key elements to achieving this.
First: Open Communications. In the old economy, scarcity was the driving force - information was power, and those with information hoarded it. That way, they amassed power, privilege and wealth. The world has changed dramatically. Our modern economy is based on abundance. Those who prosper share information. Any environment where the workforce has not tapped into all that’s going on in their organization is toxic. Suspicion, mistrust and resentment grow - and key people go.
Let all of your people know where the organization is going, how it plans to get there, how their jobs play a part, and why they are key to your success. Give your people an I’m on the inside! feeling. It’s hard to leave something when you’re an insider.
Next, Develop an Attitude of Cooperation. Be prepared to consider anything that makes it easier and more practical to work for you than for anyone else. Look at flexible hours, compassionate leave, sabbaticals, teleworking, child care facilities - anything you can afford to do to meet your people halfway (or more) in balancing their work/personal life commitments.
Finally, Develop an Atmosphere of Trust. If you want people to trust you, then you have to trust them. Create an atmosphere where management automatically expects the best . Give people a good reputation to live up to. No one is more flattered than when they are trusted implicitly.
4. Create an Atmosphere of Continual Self-Improvement
Of the people who leave their jobs, 20 percent do so because they feel that they’re not getting sufficient advancement. Not surprising, really. Flat-structured organizations don’t have the dizzying promotional heights that previous generations of workers could aspire to. So, there’s really nothing we can do unless we still have an old-fashioned multi-layer hierarchical organization, right?
No! That thinking is about as wrong as you can get. Today’s job-seekers want the opportunity to develop themselves to be all that they can be, so that their potential market value continually rises. And if they can do this without the uncertainty of job-hopping, then so much the better. You don’t necessarily have to have multiple promotional opportunities to meet this demand. What you need is a clear, ongoing development path, a way that each and every one of your people can advance their skills and value so that they become all that they can be. This means heavy investment in training and development.
Create an atmosphere of continual self-development. Give everyone access to any training that will enhance their skills, their value, and their self-esteem. Don’t be boxed in to limiting the training available to those skills specific to an individual’s current job. Remember that you are not simply training for job-effectiveness but are also offering your people the development opportunities that make them feel good enough about the pace of their personal advancement that they don’t feel the need to seek greener grass elsewhere. Engage them in their own ongoing, longer-term development. Show them how they can get all of this development from within your organization. This creates truly compelling and self-serving reasons to stay.
5. Put Your Best Foot Forward
What about the 15 percent who leave for more money? Will more recognition, better management, and opportunities for continual self-development retain them? In many cases, yes. But you still have to pay the market rate or better to stay in the game. However, it’s critical that you know when and how you pay this level.
When it comes to remuneration, put your best foot forward immediately. Pay your people as much salary, give them as many benefits, as you can afford. Do it from day one. Abandon the “What can I get her for?” thinking in favor of “How much is this position worth to me, and what can I afford to pay?” Then pay it. Let your people know that this is what you’e doing, and that you need their support and effort to help you to maintain a situation where you can continue to do this in the long term - that you need them to engage with you in making the organization successful. Put your best foot forward, and let everyone know that you are paying as much as you can and that, to continue to do so, everyone will have to pull together as a team to generate the productivity necessary for the organization’s success. We all respond to fair treatment.
Now, don’t misunderstand the advice. Pay as much as you can, not more than you can. Our advice: Know what each job is worth, and pay it early.
6. Match People to Jobs
Having followed 360,000 people through their careers during a period of 20 years, a major study published by Harvard Business Review demonstrated that a key ingredient in retaining people is ensuring that they are matched to their jobs in terms of their abilities, interests, and personalities. The study found that when you put people in jobs where the demands of the job matched their own abilities, where the stimulation offered by the job matched their particular interests, and where the cultural demands of the position matched their personalities, staff turnover decreased dramatically, and productivity increased dramatically.
Use psychometric tools to determine the requirements of each of your positions in terms of abilities, interests and personality, and then use this information to match your jobs to people who will excel in them. Gut feeling cannot do this assessment for you. It needs to be undertaken using properly validated tools designed for this purpose.
Sadly, there is no quick, easy and expensive “silver bullet” to help you win the war for quality people. But apply these six sensible steps and you can eliminate more than 95 percent of the reasons people defect, putting yourself well on track to be one of that envied class, the Employer of Choice.
Jim Sirbasku is co-founder and CEO of Profiles International, a leading provider of human resource management solutions and employment assessments for businesses worldwide. For more information about how you can attract and retain the best people, visit our website.
Article Source: ArticlesArticles.Net