4 Ways the Best Businesses Retain and Motivate Their Employees
You’ve gone through rigorous headhunting and an interviewing process to hire the best people in the industry. For them to deliver optimal value to your business, you must find ways of getting the employee to stick around. There’s no denying that higher salaries and attractive benefits are a key incentive for changing jobs. Yet, research has shown that money isn’t the number one reason people stay loyal to an employer.
A survey of 200,000 employees working in a wide range of organizations found that money came in 7th place as a factor to motivate workers to excel in the workplace. Camaraderie, recognition, impact and customer satisfaction were all viewed as more important than remuneration. Executives at large corporations are often under the impression that their brand name is more than enough to draw and retain the best talent. This is not true.
The following are some useful tactics businesses can apply to ensure their employees are loyal and motivated.
Creating a Pleasant Work Environment
A boring and gloomy work atmosphere has a way of sucking the energy out of even the most self-driven person. Organizations should make their offices functional, well-lit, aesthetically pleasing and fun. Sprucing up the workspace doesn’t have to be costly.
The first step is ensuring cleanliness and orderliness. Physical documents that are not in use should be filed away, power cables kept away from aisles and obsolete or faulty equipment replaced. Bring life to the walls with a neat painting by a local artist.
Rewarding Employees
Employees will stay with your business if they believe there’s a compelling reason to do so. A competitive salary and benefits are good, but these start to feel ‘normal’ after a while. To break this monotony and predictability, develop a staff reward program.
This incentive may be a quarterly bonus, a commission for closed deals, footing the bill for professional examinations, or profit-sharing. Also, consider setting aside an ad hoc rewards budget that can be applied to something out of the ordinary. You could, for instance, find out how much to charter a private jet, then have one of your high performing teams use it instead of taking a commercial flight during their next business trip.
Allowing Flexible Scheduling
The internet has transformed how businesses are run and how we work. If certain employees can check office mail on their smartphones or can complete a project on their laptops away from the office, it’s reasonable to allow them the flexibility of working remote or outside official hours.
A growing number of corporations have recognized the importance of offering time and location flexibility to prospective employees. Today, the majority of large businesses have some form of flexible work program with various options.
Asking for Feedback
Instead of groping in the dark trying to understand what the most effective way is to retain your best staff, it saves time and money to listen to them. The methods you used to motivate staff in the past may have been overtaken by events and no longer work.
Your competition may also have come up with new ways to attract the best talent. Since employees are at the heart of this perpetual battle for top talent, they will likely be most conversant with the latest techniques. Solicit ideas via meetings or anonymous suggestion boxes.
Create a Dream Team
Talented employees are an organization’s most valuable asset. While getting them on your team is great, retaining the brightest and best is what eventually matters. The most successful and innovative companies have figured that out and always strive to push their retention efforts to new heights. Remember, finding talent is a tedious and costly exercise; it’s only prudent that businesses do all that’s possible and practical to hold on to them.
We hope you found the promoted post as entertaining and informative as we did!
Image Source: Pixabay
