Recruitment vs Retention

As a recruitment provider, we will always strive to assist your company in recruiting the best talent available in the market. The trick is getting the talent to stick! Unfortunately some employers overlook the fact that recruiting a new employee is only one of many steps that contribute to the overall employer/employee relationship, and therefore retention.

Now let’s drill down on this point!

The sign of a strong and happy workforce is the ability to retain good staff. Anyone can attract talent by offering good money/packages and portraying the illusion of an ideal workplace. But, when the honeymoon period ends and it is business as usual, some managers/employers fail to continue to nurture the relationships within their workplace.

When I engage with Managers/CEOs of businesses who have a high staff turnover rate, I ask them what they do to try and retain their people.  The majority of respondents tell me that they pay their staff well and can’t understand why they continue to have to recruit to replace. Even when a staff member resigns, they tell me they try and retain the employee by offering a pay rise.

To gauge more of an understanding of the situation, I ask these employers a couple of simple questions:

  1. What did the departing employee do for fun outside of work, such as hobbies and interests?
  2. What projects or initiatives did this employee contribute to within the company?

More often than not, the responses I get for question 1 are very generic to non-existent. Simply knowing “John likes sport and plays golf” is very shallow. For question 2, I often get blank looks and there is some confusion.

Why do I ask these questions? Because I get to understand how valued the staff member was made to feel.

We, as humans, have an inherit need to be valued. Getting to know your employees and what makes them “tick” shows that they are not “just a number” within the organisation, but that the boss actually takes an interest in their life outside of work.

If an employee can be made to feel a part of the company by giving them some responsibility or even asking them what they think about a problem/solution, they are made to feel a part of the direction the company is going.

Money doesn’t buy happiness!

This is an old saying and it can attract a lot of funny answers, but the sentiment is real!  Studies have shown that 80% of staff make the decision to stay or leave a company by the way they are managed day-to-day within the company, not necessarily by the pay packet they get.

The salary amount is often what attracts an employee to the company, but once in, it plays only a small part of the equation. Why? It’s simple psychology: people are paid weekly/fortnightly/monthly. This means pay only has a relevance once a week/fortnight/month in an employee’s life. What’s happening on all other days? If a staff member feels like they are being bullied, mistreated or gets the impression that they are not valued on a day-to-day basis, their pay packet will only hold them for a short period of time. Employees are looking to be appreciated and feel valued within an organisation – it’s that which helps you retain the good staff you have.

Workplace Assessment

If you feel your workplace needs a bit of a lift or is running a high staff turnover ratio, why not give us a call?  Tech 5 can visit your workplace and give it a full independent “WOF” to see how your staff feel and what could be done to improve retention. For a confidential no obligation chat, feel free to contact myself – John Dustow – your HR and Employment Law Specialist.