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The state of the job market has raised the stakes in the war for talent. An unemployment rate of just 6% makes it easy for your top performers to find another job if they’re unhappy working for you—and hard for you to replace them.
The odds are that many of your employees are restless. A study by Towers Perrin, a human resources, risk- and financial-management consultancy, suggests that more than two-thirds of Canadians are open to considering a job offer from another employer or a professional recruiter working for them.
How will your key employees respond if a recruiter comes calling? You’re taking a big risk if you simply hope for the best, because you’ll face a tough slog finding their successors. An international survey by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, an HR, actuarial and finance consultancy, found that 69% of employers are struggling to attract high-performing staff, and replacing them costs up to three times their annual salary.
But HR specialists say you can stop the poachers with an employee-retention plan that addresses the concerns most likely to tempt your people to leave. When you craft the plan, you should have someone well versed in HR strategies, whether in-house or an outside consultant, at the table. Get your managers’ buy-in by having them help create it. And appoint a senior executive to take ownership of and be accountable for the plan. Here are the key elements it should include:
Your first and best line of defence is your line managers. “People don’t quit companies; they quit bosses,” says Bruce Snow, a partner at Robertson Surrette, a Halifax-based recruitment firm. You need to educate your managers that there’s no longer a long lineup of potential hires outside—at least, not of top-tier performers.
Snow says you also need to educate managers in skills such as diversity training, cultural sensitivity and generational training. Other important traits? “Managers who listen, who provide feedback and recognition, and who mentor are the most likely to engage and retain your employees,” says Patrick Hartling, principal of SPL Development Services, a Halifax-based retention consultancy.
Employees who have only a vague sense of their long-term prospects at your firm may be receptive to a recruiter who can put their future into sharper focus. It’s not that you have to spell out every promotion they’ll get until age 65; rather, offer them concrete ideas on where you see them over the next few years.
But beware of making unrealistic promises or failing to follow through. Drew Railton, a Vancouver-based partner with recruitment firm The Caldwell Partners International, says many of the easiest recruits are people whose current employer has promised much and delivered little.
A benefits package that appeals to a 50-plus employee is unlikely to wow a 20-something. So, sticking with a traditional “one size fits all” benefits plan leaves you vulnerable to competitors that offer more flexibility.
Snow recommends that you adopt “flexible benefit dollars,” an idea popular in Europe that’s spreading to Canada. This scheme allows employees to choose how to “spend” a specified dollar total on benefits from a fixed menu. Parents might, for instance, prefer flexible hours to make it easier to drop off and pick up their kids from daycare, while older workers might choose topped-up pension benefits. And, says Snow, “20-somethings might prefer a fridge full of pop and the ability to work at night.”
The Towers Perrin study concluded that the top driver of retention is employee engagement, which is driven above all by senior management’s sincere interest in employee well-being. The co-founders of ParetoLogic, a Victoria-based developer of data-protection software, pride themselves on taking that kind of interest in their staff as individuals. But that became much harder as their workforce ballooned from six to well over 100. They therefore asked their HR director, Priscilla Tumbach, to create a database on employees’ personal lives, such as their skills, hobbies, educational pursuits and details about their families. The goal: to gain a richer understanding of how their staff’s jobs fit into their overall lives.
“We believe our employees come to work as a whole person—as a mother or father, husband or wife, sister or brother, aunt or uncle—and we support them at work in that way,” says Tumbach. Managers draw on the database’s insights into employees’ lives outside the office when conducting, say, a performance review or a career/succession-planning exercise.
ParetoLogic’s HR team gathers the data by interviewing employees or asking them to fill out forms. Tumbach stresses that privacy is paramount and staff aren’t obliged to provide this information. She cites the database as one of the keys to the firm’s 93% staff-retention rate in 2007.
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