If you really care about your business, you’ll care for your employees. Follow these tips on how to keep your employees happy and engaged.
It’s one thing to find and recruit good talent for your company, but retaining your most talented employees for a long period of time is a completely different matter. This is becoming increasingly difficult for many companies, as one of the main tenets of the “millennial” generation is that the best and easiest way to find success (read: rise through the corporate ladder) is to jump from company to company, instead of staying with the same company for decades.
As a company that employs a good number of recent college graduates, CleanTelligent has had to take a good, long look at finding effective ways to ensure that our best employees stay here because they want to be here. Here are some of the “golden nuggets” that we’ve discovered and implemented over the years:
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Multiple types of compensation: It’s no secret that many employees — especially younger ones — no longer see salaries and raises as the end-all, be-all of human existence. Benefits that are also offered to your employees can include anything from something large, like an end-of-year bonus, to the little perks that help each day go by more smoothly. One small perk we include here at CleanTelligent is that our break room is always supplied with free snacks, ranging from potato chips to trail mix. It’s not something that will show up on the bottom line, per se, but it’s something that helps our employees feel more at home when in the office.
Forbes Magazine states the following regarding retaining good employees: “Beyond salary/bonus/equity, think about ‘rewarding’ employees for truly superior performance. … While feedback is important, people also need to feel appreciated in a tangible way.”
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Give your employees a voice: I’m not sure if I can speak for everyone, but I feel valued by my managers if they actively seek feedback from me. It helps me understand that I wasn’t hired just because I had qualifications A, B and C. I was hired because I would bring a unique and valuable perspective to my team. Because many of your employees are the “ground forces” of your business, they bring a perspective to the company that managers may not have. It’s up to the manager to give these employees opportunities to share their ideas on bettering the company.
If one of your employees is extremely productive and efficient in getting inspections done, for example, give that employee opportunities to share their ideas with co-workers. In the long run, your organization gains and uses a series of innovative processes that have been created and shared by the employees who know and use it best.
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Cater your company culture to what interests THEM: If you want your best employees to actively choose to stay with your company, then it may be in your best interest to be more accommodating of what your employees enjoy.
For some, this may mean your break room has ESPN so your employees can watch some sports while on their lunch break. For others, it may mean you take your entire team out for a midday Laser Tag outing every once in a while. Because every company and every workforce is different, feel free to be creative with how you choose to do this at your business.
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Help your employees grow and flourish: Give your employees the opportunity to excel and grow. A big part of this is putting your employees in positions and projects where their own unique skills are best utilized. There will be times when Employee X needs to take on and assume responsibility for tasks that aren’t exactly his or her “dream job,” but avoiding this problem whenever possible will go a long way in helping employees feel valued.
At CleanTelligent, we had a scenario where our Customer Support Manager, Jason Pyne, had been very successful in the position he was in but he had reached his ceiling in terms of how he could positively affect the company as a whole. Pyne’s talents, as it turned out, were better suited for a position that had a greater influence on the overall direction of the company instead. Because the President of our company had taken the time to get to know him, he recognized where those talents could be used to help the company grow. Pyne was moved to General Manager, a position where his talents and skill set would be more influential, and as a result, CleanTelligent has never been stronger.
You may be noticing a trend here. It is true that the way you choose to implement any or all of the above will be based entirely on what you feel comfortable with, but it all begins and ends with getting to know your employees on a personal level. If you treat your employees merely as human resources that are to be managed while they’re on the job, you run the serious risk of losing your best, most talented and successful employees. The company that learns how to empower the individuals in its workforce is the company that will retain the employees that can take it to the next level.