Tag Archive for: employee retention

The demographics of the modern workplace have changed significantly, and you only have to look at the numbers to realize this. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, millennials are already the largest segment in the workplace. Within the next two years, 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be made up of millennials, and that percentage will climb to 75% by 2030.

Unfortunately, millennials are, statistically speaking, also the least engaged generation in the workforce. A Gallup Study shows only 29% are engaged, while 55% are not engaged, and 16% are actively disengaged. The same study indicates that 21% of millennials switch jobs within a year, and 60% say they are open to a different opportunity. All told, millennials turnover costs the U.S. economy an estimated $30.5 billion annually.

However, millennials also present a myriad of opportunities in the workplace. From impressive skill ranges, creativity, and open-mindedness to tech-driven ideas and loyalty, there’s so much these employees bring to your organization. For the modern employer, the challenge is to find innovative ways to tap into these employees’ potential and retain them in the workforce. In this article, we’ll explore how you can creatively attract and keep millennials as a valuable asset in your organization.

 

Have A Meaningful Vision

What is your organization about? This is the first question these job candidates consider when looking for an employer. Millennials want to work for an employer who has a meaningful vision beyond a good bottom line. To click with this segment of the population, your organization must endeavor to improve the lives of people.

For millennials, a meaningful vision translates to better lives and a brighter future for both the employee and the society. Your vision has to show your employees how their work positively impacts the community around them and the world.

 

Embrace Social Media/Mobile Technology

If you want to catch the attention of millennials, go social. From Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter to LinkedIn and Facebook, there’s no better way to reach out to millennials. When thinking of content to attract millennials, make sure you focus on mobile-friendly touchpoints. Your content must be responsive across all platforms because this generation also has the largest access to smartphones.

 

Think Beyond Financial Benefits

Millennials are after value and not only financial benefits. These employees want to work in organizations that respect their work-life balance. Research indicates that millennials are drawn by innovative employee benefits like in-house professional development, massages and yoga, free books, flexible hours, a fair work-life balance, onsite health services, mental health support, and more.

 

Build Your Company Reputation/Be Socially Responsible

Poor brand reputation turns off millennials more than it does other generations. Think of potential employees as customers, which means putting time, thought, and care into engaging with them and creating a positive experience for them. Embracing transparency is key, as is maintaining an active and supportive presence on employee review sites and social media.

Set up an active social media plan across platforms with regular positive posts. Have a PR plan in place and follow it through. Share your positive reviews anywhere you can to show that you’re a top-rate business.

Make sure you provide a forum or feedback mechanism for your brand or business so that employees have a place to go to express their complaints or grievances. This portrays a brand that’s willing to become better.

 

Rethink Your Model of Millennial Engagement

How do you engage with your employees? Do you give them room to contribute ideas for the development of your organization, or does everything come from the corner office?

Millennials are after employers who value their input by opening multiple channels of engagement. Regularly engage in brainstorming sessions that provide a medium for employee innovations and other positive engagements that will attract and keep millennial workers.

Stay in touch and offer regular feedback to your employees. Through such feedback, these employees can evaluate their input to your organization and see the impact of their contributions.

 

Embrace Technology

One distinguishing factor for millennials is their affinity for technology. If your organization still relies on outdated techniques or concepts, up your game to attract the best talent in your industry. Millennials have grown up using technology, unlike baby boomers who have had to learn along the way. To attract and keep millennial employees, identify areas where you can integrate innovative technology.

 

Promote Diversity

The last thing you want is to allow stereotypes or create an environment where anyone feels discriminated against because of their background. You will not only turn off potential employees, but the best talent in your organization will leave.

Millennial employees expect you to create a workplace that’s welcoming, like a second home. Forward-looking organizations today encourage diversity in their ranks and create a comfortable and welcoming workplace for people of all backgrounds.

 

Final Thoughts

Traditional organizations face a tremendous challenge in their engagement with millennials. As an employer, rethink your organizational culture and recreate it to welcome these highly talented individuals. Millennials are looking at employers they can trust and those who really care about people and environment.

Looking for the best talent for your organization? At Dover Staffing, we offer comprehensive recruitment solutions for employers to tap the best skills on the market. Contact us today and let us help you find the right people to work for you.

 

Image credits: Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Building your employer brand involves more than attracting talent to your workplace. It also requires an in-depth understanding of how to use social media and technology to attract talent and support employee engagement. Today, whether it’s workforce retention in the manufacturing industry or talent acquisition for corporate offices, this issue represents a major challenge in the workplace.

To expand on your efforts, you need to support employee advocacy; make your company’s culture interesting and welcoming; popularize and build your brand on social media; use AI for staffing and hiring; and support education outreach initiatives. These five key strategies will get you started.

 

1. Support Employee Advocacy

Supporting employee advocacy within your organization humanizes your employer brand and extends your influence in branding, advertising, marketing, staffing and hiring, and talent retention. By developing an advocacy program, you can encourage brand ambassadorship from your employees.

Creating an Advocacy Program

Creating an advocacy program involves:

  • Identifying your employer brand in innovative terms.
  • Focusing on service.
  • Showing support for employee concerns and needs.
  • Highlighting your employer brand as a leader in your field.
  • Giving back to your community or the world through environmental sustainability or volunteer assignments.
  • Developing a company culture that inspires trust, which is instrumental for staffing and hiring top talent — and for continued employee retention.

Do your employees love coming to work? Do they like sharing their work experiences? Answering these key questions will help you develop an employee advocacy program that enhances employee retention and helps you find top talent. Passionate employees can serve as indirect — yet powerful — staffing and hiring recruiters. They also make it possible for your staffing agency to find and recruit the best of the best employees.

You can easily develop an employee advocacy program today, thanks to social media. Using your employees’ perceptions of your brand can be helpful for workforce retention.

To begin, you need to establish goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). While employees of your company may post their impressions about work on social media, you still need to set defined goals for your program to track and analyze results.

Make it your goal to step up employee engagement by increasing brand awareness. Encourage employees to post their views of your employer brand and offerings. For example, if you plan to provide a new service, create shareable information — something that will excite and motivate employees to post the content.

Next, you need to focus on the key metrics, including:

  • The top contributors, or which employees or teams share the most information on social media. What is the level of employee engagement?
  • Your brand’s organic reach. How many people see employee-generated posts?
  • Outside engagement. How many people comment on the content posted by employees?
  • Traffic. How much traffic does employee engagement drive to your employer brand and site.

Finally, review how your employer advocacy initiatives affect your employer brand perception on social media.

Other Activities That Build Your Employer Brand

You can also improve your employer brand for employee retention and hiring purposes by taking these steps:

  • Create testimonial videos and share them on your website and social media.
  • Craft tweets that convey employee satisfaction or share career advancement opportunities.

By turning your best-performing employees into brand ambassadors, you will raise awareness about your organization and employer brand.

 

2. Turn Your Employer Brand Into a Talent Magnet

To become a talent magnet or increase talent retention, you must make your company’s culture inviting and interesting. Here are several ways to accomplish this goal:

  • Establish a protocol that supports transparent management and leadership.
  • Show appreciation to your employees regularly.
  • Treat all your employees with respect and fairness.
  • Encourage employee engagement, collaboration and communication.
  • Build positive relationships in the workplace.
  • Highlight company innovations.

If you make your workplace culture inviting and supportive, you cannot help but become a magnet for top talent.

 

3. Build a Popular Employer Brand on Social Media Accounts

To popularize your employer brand, you need to maintain a high-quality profile on your social media accounts — one that will allow you to connect with top talent and support your talent retention initiatives.

Studies reveal that candidates research company profiles before applying for jobs through a staffing agency online. It pays off, then, to use employee engagement and your employer brand to fuel interest in your company.

This requires starting meaningful conversations, tracking engagement, and positively taking part in social media activities.

 

4. Use AI for Staffing and Hiring

You can collaborate with your staffing agency by using artificial intelligence (AI) for staffing and hiring as well. Here are some ways automation can improve these processes:

  • Automating the recruitment process.
  • Screening and short-listing candidates.
  • Scheduling and coordinating interviews.
  • Supporting mobility of redeployment for workforce retention.
  • Sourcing or reactivating the data on passive candidates.

Using the latest recruitment software or AI technologies can help you organize your HR activities for better workforce retention and employer brand awareness.

 

5. Develop Apprenticeship Programs and Internships

You can also develop your employer brand and increase talent retention by working with schools and colleges to develop apprenticeship programs and internships. An education outreach program gives students the initiative to find work in a job they love and helps you, as a company, maintain employee retention.

 

Final Thoughts

In the current digital climate, it pays to build your employer brand to attract top talent and increase employee retention. By becoming more proactive on social media and collaborating with a staffing agency, you can meet many of today’s HR challenges.

Because you have special staffing and hiring requirements, you need support from an expert in the staffing field. At Dover Staffing, we can help you with your unique HR needs. Contact us now to learn more about our services.

 

Image credits: Photo by Shurkin on Freepik.

In today’s increasingly complex economic landscape, business leaders have to focus on far more than simply the product or service their company offers. To become or remain competitive, organizations must also consider how they are viewed by employees in terms of the appeal of their workplace culture, compensation levels, and benefits packages. From huge tech companies like Google to industry giants like L’Oreal and IKEA, the emphasis now is on
investing in employee happiness and well-being by creating an employer brand that attracts and retains top talent. In this article, we’ll explore the reasons why it’s so critical to developing an employer brand, and how you can build yours.

Importance of Building an Employer Brand

As modern CEOs, HR departments, and marketing leaders can tell you, employer branding is of the utmost strategic importance. Many leaders believe that employer brand responsibility lies with the CEO or marketing department, while CEOs may argue this responsibility lies with HR and recruiting. But the bottom line is that building an employer brand is so important that every part of an organization has a role to play in ensuring it is done successfully. The development of a robust employer presence is critical to attracting and retaining talented employees, and as such should be a top priority across all organizational levels.

How to Build Your Employer Brand

We’ve got some tips on how you can build your employer brand in such a way that you’ll be able to attract and retain talented employees. Here’s how:

1. Conduct a brand awareness and reputation analysis.

First, you’ll want to know where your company stands in terms of its employer brand. To determine the strength (or lack thereof) of your company’s reputation as an employer, you should survey target audiences and key external stakeholders. You should also survey existing employees to gauge their experience and level of satisfaction. The information gained in these surveys will enable you to establish metrics to measure growth and develop a change strategy to improve your employer brand reputation. To do this, you’ll want to work with your HR department to create organization-specific objectives.

Focus on these fundamental objectives, as well as the company-specific ones you develop based on your analysis:

  • Secure recruitment needs in the long term.
  • Grow your employer brand locally and globally.
  • Differentiate your employer brand from your competitors.

By accomplishing these objectives, you’ll be on your way to strong employer branding and, by extension, talent attraction and retention.

2. Create, promote, and invest in employee development and learning initiatives.

The workforce is currently and will, for the foreseeable future, be dominated by the millennial generation. This generation is known for their expectations regarding learning and development opportunities within their chosen career. They want to grow and expand within their companies.
By offering these opportunities, you’ll be much more likely to retain your talent, as well as attract new talent. Moreover, your company will be stronger and more effective because you’ll be maintaining employees who know their jobs.

A powerful way to meet this expectation is by embracing e-learning. Millennials are knowledgeable about technology and want to be able to complete activities to grow and learn in their own time. Even more beneficial are those opportunities that enable your employees to gain certifications and credentials that they can use in other companies in the future.

3. Capitalize on brand value.

Employer brand management is critical to attracting new talent, as employer branding plays a major role in the decisions candidates make about which companies to apply to. Potential employees must understand company strengths to feel engaged and start building loyalty to the brand mission. Some brands create a website where they talk about their brand ethos, which has yielded positive results in attracting talent by showing exactly how the brand
will benefit them and vice versa. These websites are also great because the team gets an opportunity to show what they do and share their experiences.

4. Personalize the experience.

It’s important to personalize the experience individuals have on the pathway from candidate to employee. In fact, retention is often based on employee experience because all employees need to know that they matter as people. Here are some ideas on how to incorporate this into your organization’s hiring and HR policies:

  • Map out a career roadmap with each employee, which helps you see where their talent lies and how you can help them be the best employee possible, as well as meet their personal career goals.
  • Engage in employee recognition. This boosts morale, leading to increased motivation, acknowledgment of efforts, and increased productivity.
  • Develop nurturing relationships, especially between employees and immediate supervisors for an interpersonal connection.

5. Engage in internal communication.

Talent attraction and retention aren’t going to be effective without communication. Brands have to communicate the value and need for a strong employer brand and how employees can help fulfill this goal. As today’s world is more transparent, clever recruiting efforts are no longer sufficient for an effective employer brand image. Instead, there must be an emphasis on existing employees and their satisfaction to generate interest from new talent and keep current talent.

You’ve got unique staffing needs. At Dover Staffing, we can help you meet these needs, so contact us today for more information on how we can help you.

 

 

 

 

Image Credits: Photo by Lookstudio on FreePik

The search for top talent is always a priority for managers trying to harness a capable and robust workforce. However, the effort to retain talent once hired is just as critical. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 3 million Americans quit their job every month; other studies indicate that roughly 30% of all new hires quit before getting to the half-year mark.

This trend can be the leaking bucket in your company. It paralyzes your business’ core functions, and the process of hiring and training a replacement can be a costly one.

But how do you retain your mission-critical employees in such a highly competitive job market? In this article, we’ll explore seven employee retention strategies to help you maintain a talented workforce years on end and ultimately drive your business growth.

 

1. Get it Right from the Start

Some estimate that as much as 80% of employee turnover is due to poor hiring decisions. It’s vital to realize that retention starts from the beginning of the hiring process, from the application and screening to choosing the ideal candidates. Identify what skill sets, values, and experiences you want to emphasize in your company, and then look out for those in your candidates.

This approach allows you to hire people who fit your company’s expectations and whose expectations you can fulfill. A team that resonates with your company’s culture is more likely to stay and contribute, thus leading to increased productivity.

Working with a staffing and talent firm that can evaluate your company’s goals and staffing needs is also an excellent option to onboard the ideal candidates for your company.

 

2. Invest in Employees Professional Development

Helping your team achieve their long and short-term goals is one of the most crucial employee retention strategies. A significant percentage of employees report that their job satisfaction is tied to having a clear path for career growth.

Think of investing in your employees as a long game; it links their career development goals to your company, which prompts them to say. The longer they stay, the more productive they become, which ensures your return on investment.

Consider designing in-house training and mentorship programs to foster professional development. You may also want to adopt other methods such as paying for your employees to attend conferences and workshops, offering tuition reimbursements, and promoting from within whenever possible.

 

3. Provide and Receive Feedback

Your employees need feedback to do their best at work and focus on areas of improvement. Frequent positive feedback motivates your workforce and gives them the determination to be their best. Constructive criticism is equally essential to rectify an issue that may otherwise escalate into more significant problems for your business.

On the flip side, employees are also seeking an opportunity to give you feedback. Your team may disengage if they feel you’re not open to their thoughts or ideas. It’s essential to create a culture of communication where your staff feel comfortable and safe to share their feedback with you or the management.

Keeping lines of communication open is critical to employee retention. Two-way communication builds trust and encourages transparency.

 

4. Engage Your Employees

Modern-day employees care about fulfillment and making a difference as much as they care about paying the bills. New staff members want to contribute towards positive change in the company or the community and feel you hired them for a reason.

As such, it is important to give your members stimulating assignments and varied tasks, involve them in decision making, and make conscious efforts to cultivate inclusion in your company.

Philanthropic programs, social programs to facilitate bonding amongst coworkers, and unity around a shared vision for the company nurture inclusivity and give employees a sense of meaning and belonging.

 

5. Out of the Box Benefits

Offering your employees competitive wages and benefits is important, but it is not always about money. While your team members need the financial security of a good salary, health, and retirement benefits, these are the bare minimum when it comes to employee attraction and retention.

Look beyond these staples and evaluate what will truly serve the needs of your employees. For instance, flexible work schedules, stock options, and other financial incentives like gym memberships, fitness training, child care, and sabbaticals are popular benefits that employers use to enhance retention.

Another alternative is to solicit your teams’ feedback to understand the benefits that would ideally enhance their lives and wellbeing. You may also want to allow for tailored benefit options to account for employee demographics in your team. For example, boomers and millennials will be motivated by different benefit packages.

 

6. Encourage a Healthy Work-life Balance

All the benefits in the world cannot compensate for burnout and chronic overwhelm. Overworking your team will cause them to lose focus and possibly give up on your important projects. In contrast, when you don’t overwork your employees, they will have the energy to work more productively. Perform regular top-down evaluations on your workforce to ensure that no member of your team is getting overworked.

Encourage all levels of your company to prioritize healthy workloads that strike a balance between work and personal life. Ensure that managers are modeling a good example so that other employees feel comfortable to adopt a work-life balance.

 

7. Understand What Makes Your Employees Stay

More and more companies are adding stay interviews to their employee retention toolkit. These are typically discussions with employees to understand why an employee wants to work for your company and what it will take to keep them.

Gaining insight into why your team would want to stay is a significant metric to help you identify which policies best contribute to your employee retention strategy as well as highlight areas of improvement. Be open to the feedback you get and use it to streamline your internal policies.

 

Keeping Your Workforce

Are you looking to build a dynamic workforce that will stay its course and guarantee your ROI? Look no further. Dover Staffing, Inc is an award-winning staffing solutions company in Atlanta, GA. We have rendered superior talent and staffing services to build our name as a dependable staffing company over the years.

For more information on staffing and employee retention, feel free to contact us today, and we will be more than willing to assist.

 

Image credits: Photo by August de Richelieu from Pexels