Secret To Success In Employee Engagement & Retention Battle

The employees, associates, knowledge workers, technical and functional specialists, all together make a company successful. Ever analyzed what is the key to engage and retain this top talent?

To uncover the perfect answer to this, most of the organizations spend a lot of money, effort and time, but still the most obvious solution is overlooked. If the question is related to employees then why not ask the employees what will keep them engaged with the company and in what situations they might part their ways?

To prevent an employee from exiting, it is better to conduct stay interviews rather than waiting to sit in an exit interview.

It is quite possible that managers, when suggested to ask their employees about what would make them stay with the company, might throw out various kinds of reactions like:

“Are you kidding me? Is it legal?”
or
“What if they ask for something that I can’t provide?”

Some managers roam around the fear of getting more than they can settle or what they can handle on their own and there are others who use time as their excuse. If you too are falling in any of these two categories then you are definitely missing out the best way to retain your top talent.

There is never a single way or the perfect time to do the asking. However, it is better to perform the stay interviews during the developmental discussions. There, you can simply ask

“What is it which will keep you here & what might be the reasons due to which you would like to quit?”

Most of the employees don’t just want a hike in salary; there can be many other enhancements that they might want to avail. So just keep asking, don’t worry about how you are going to satisfy them. You’ll definitely find a point which is within your reach and which can be fulfilled.

To serve this purpose, timely performance evaluations and grievance handling can be provided via an efficient workforce management solution. Through such a system, employees can put in their grievances or suggestions and the same can be handled by the concerned authority. Along with listening, authorities can even respond to the queries and create a two-way communication between the two parties – employee and the manager.

Apart from this, if you don’t want to address the career discussion formally, take your treasured employees for a cup of coffee and make them more comfortable with you so that you can easily understand what their future plans are and how the company is contributing in fulfilling them.

It can be said that; no matter what the size of your business is, having employees leave is just bad for everyone. To avoid the negativity of losing your top talent, practice stay interviews, because asking will not only make your employees feel valued, but also their responses can help you create future strategies which will be in favor of both employees and the company so that both can together move forward in a progressive direction.

Employees have control in today’s market; they say “you’re lucky that I’m working for you.” If you don’t treat them properly they’ll go and find a new employer. Thus, providing compensation is just not enough; to retain a potential employee you need to provide him/her the other pieces of the puzzle too – environment, support, relationship and growth.