Finding the right person to hire costs you a lot of time, money, and effort. It might cost you even more to onboard and train them. Then, no matter how hard-working they are, it will take years for them to get enough experience to consider themselves experts.
Now, imagine if, at that critical point, they decide just to go someplace else. This wouldn’t just be costly. It would also be disappointing and disheartening. It will also return you to the beginning of this process.
Fortunately, you can leverage modern technology to improve your talent retention rates. Here are ten ways to do so.
1. A gadget as a bonus
Money is money, right, and your employees can always use the bonus to purchase whatever they want. While this is true for a bonus they expect, it shouldn’t always be the case with a surprise bonus. After all, getting them a gadget that they want but that they would never buy on their own can be a unique way to improve your image in their eyes.
For instance, while you could give them a $300-$400 bonus, is this better than bequeathing them with a Stem Deck? The latter shows that you’ve invested extra thought and effort, which is, on its own, worth quite a bit. It also means being extra thoughtful and creative.
2. Present them with a career roadmap
Most employees who leave do so because they’re worried they don’t have a future in your enterprise. Instead of encouraging them, why not present them with an actual career roadmap?
It’s important that you give them something to aspire to but that you’re also transparent in your aspirations. Ask them where they see themselves in five years, but clarify that this is so that you know how to stir their career path. Sometimes, this will require a lateral move or cross-training, but it’s worth it as long as they’re on the right path.
3. Start using a HR platform
Your HR department is in charge of your staff, which means that providing it with better tools has to result in better outcomes. Finding the right software is no longer as difficult since there are many honest reviewers out there that you can look up. You can even check interfaces online to ensure that the platforms in question are to your liking.
A good HR platform will help you with almost every item from this list, ranging from a more fair evaluation of your employees to employee self-service and performance management. Overall, using an HR platform is a way to facilitate the administrative aspect of staff management. As long as you’re responsible and treating your team fairly, the chances that they’ll leave will be significantly lower.
4. Provide flexible work arrangement
People want to be in command of their own time, and in 2023, you can provide this control without any downsides to your brand. First of all, you need to understand that, with modern project management tools, they can participate in work even while away.
Working from home is cheaper for everyone. You can rent out a smaller office, avoid buying more devices since your employees will have to work with their own devices, and avoid paying travel expenses. You also give them a chance to work at their own pace and at their own preferred time of day (when they believe they’re the most productive).
5. Make better workstations
Chances are that if you’re a terminally online person (like many other people in the tech field), you would have to turn around and check the color of the curtains on your window. However, you could remember the order of the icons on your desktop in a heartbeat.
Let’s face it: most people spend most of their day looking at the screen. This is why the workstation is more important than anything else in the room. Minimal decoration is fine, but you must provide your staff with dual monitors, noise-canceling headphones, adjustable desks, and ergonomic chairs. By doing this, you’ll create a far more pleasant work environment.
6. Shares in the company
What better way to tie people to your company than to reward them with company shares? By doing so, you’ll help them develop a sense of ownership of your company. They’ll try harder since they’ll understand that their performance directly impacts their affluence. This is not always the case, especially for workers on a salary.
You can use the right tool to give them this compensation. You see, tracking values and shares is not always easy, but with the right accounting tool on your side, it shouldn’t be too much trouble either.
7. Better onboarding and training
Taking too long to get accustomed to a new workplace will plant the seed of doubt in the minds of a lot of your employees and even convince them that they’re in the wrong place. You can do just that by leveraging technology to create better onboarding practices.
Second, there’s a prejudice that employers are the only ones who want higher productivity. Do you honestly think that people want to be bad at their jobs? Do you believe they enjoy getting bad scores during the evaluation or feel they’re not contributing? Of course not; this is why, with better training, you can help them move past this. As a result, they’ll feel like they belong.
8. Remote teambuilding
Many people stay longer in the enterprise because they already have a great relationship with their coworkers (not because of their boss). In a digital environment, however, engaging in team building is harder (or so it was believed in the past). The thing is that, instead of taking your team out to play paintball, you can always host a CS: GO game.
Remember that this is a great thing, even for teams working in the office. More people play video games than ever in history, which is great even for people rushing home who can’t stay for beer after work. Most importantly, you don’t want to make this mandatory. It also means you don’t have to take your entire team to a resort.
9. Fire troublemakers
The least productive employees are not always easy to discover. Sure, in your mind, a bad employee constantly underperforms. However, what if they’re great employees who make other people’s lives a living hell? By firing someone who constantly backstabs, bullies, or distracts others, you can boost productivity and convince some of your employees that you have their best interests at heart.
The reason why you need technology is to make the reporting system accurate and anonymous. Also, to uncover this, the questions you’ll ask must be outside the box. You can’t just inquire about their performance; your question must be more nuanced. Fortunately, you can find the right survey tools with ease online.
10. Improve exit interviews
You can’t keep them all. Even the most loyal of employees are likely to leave at one point. In these scenarios, you should conduct a good exit interview to determine exactly what contributed to their decision to leave.
While 75% of companies perform exit interviews, very few of them do it right. Remember that strong software can turn your responses into actionable information when you have enough data. This way, while you can’t make the employee stay, you can improve your business model to lower abandonment rates in the future. Just remember that people leave, and you’ll never bring the exit rate down to zero.
With the right tool, each of your talent retention attempts will have more effect
While each method can be done even without technology, it will become a lot easier to handle with the right platform. This way, you keep all the paperwork and all the data to help you improve your talent retention process in the future. This way, you’re looking at much better odds.