Talent management is a crucial aspect in cultivating a healthy workplace. Employees and employers work in a mutually beneficial manner, where employees provide their skills and knowledge to help make the company a success. In turn, the company offers them a stable source of income and (ideally) professional fulfillment.
This is the ideal scenario in an ideal world. However, things don’t always stay the same, especially when there’s an economic slowdown or a recession. Managing employees becomes complicated when there are external forces that an employer has no control over.
To counter any influence of such external forces, it’s essential to optimize for long-term employee retention even in times of economic hardship. At VP Legacies, we believe in the power of personal connection as a way to engage employees. But how can you connect during a recession? Here’s our guide.
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Why Is Employee Retention Important?
Employee retention is how companies make sure that their talent stays with them. When it comes to an unpredictable scenario like recession, employee retention plays a huge role in minimizing losses for employers. When the market situation is unstable, employees tend to feel unsafe and thus are more likely to jump ship.
For an employer, hiring a new employee costs money. There’s training, onboarding, and other costs involved that put a dent in an already tightened wallet. Employee retention is beneficial for both employees and employers.
How to Create a Recession-Proof Employee Retention Plan
This recession-proof employee retention plan will keep employee morale high and make a company surf against the tides of recession when it comes to managing their human resources.
Communication Is Key
The first step to retaining employees is to have a solid internal communication strategy. Employees like to stay updated about some of the inner workings of an organization. Every big or small success should be shared with the employees. Not only do they feel like their work is producing a tangible benefit but it also increases their confidence in the company. This plays a huge role during the recession as employees won’t feel like their job is at risk as the company is doing well and keeps them updated.
Focus On Training
All employees want to grow on a professional level. If they feel like they’ve stagnated, they’ll look for opportunities where they see scope for them to grow and learn more. If an organization has a training program, employees won’t look for the same opportunity elsewhere as there’s a risk involved.
Invest in training employees, giving them the opportunity to learn and grow and it will reward an organization by increased loyalty and increased productivity. In addition to onboarding training, ongoing training is also important. This helps employees feel valued and develop a personal connection with your company.
Need to build a custom eLearning training program for your company? Find out how VP Legacies can help.
Provide Recognition
Apart from their salary, employees also want to feel appreciated on a personal level. They put in 8-10 hours on a daily basis for a company, and reinforcing them with due praise in any way you can will affect their morale, productivity, and happiness.
If you don’t reinforce your valued employees, they might feel insecure about their job status and start looking for a new job during a recession. To avoid this, one must make sure all employees feel valued and appreciated. This can be done by recognizing their achievements, hard work, and team effort. By setting up reward systems and incentivizing their contribution, employers are safeguarding the interests of the employees and in turn, benefiting from their increased morale.
Stay Connected
The importance of developing a personal connection is heavily underrated in the rulebook of employee retention. Armchair management just does not work when it comes to a healthy workplace environment. The sheer fact that the leaders in an organization are present and active gives employees a sense of comfort. Personal connections with top-level employees gives forth a sense of availability and trust that is hard to achieve with distant and absent leadership.
Seek Feedback
How does one know what an employee wants? The easiest way is to simply ask them. Often plans don’t work how they are intended to and most managements have no way of quantifying the results. To do so, getting employee feedback becomes a necessity.
An anonymous feedback program can offer invaluable insight into what the employees are thinking and can expose the management to shortcomings they aren’t even aware of. This helps draft a more effective plan of action for the future of any organization.
Take Action
The next step after receiving feedback is to take action. If one has all the information necessary, there needs to be a certain plan of action to implement whatever decision has been made. When employees notice that their opinions are being heard and acted upon in an organization, they feel a personal connection that motivates them to work harder and with a boost in their morale. The key to employee retention is to take the right action at the right time and to be proactive as and when the need arises.
Manage Change Effectively
Change is an inevitable part of every organization. Sometimes it is positive and sometimes it is negative, what matters is how an organization deals with the change and more importantly how it deals with the employees during that period. Remember that when an organization is changing, the employees too feel the effect of the change – whether it is a rise in sales or a merger or even layoffs.
It is important to have a strong internal communication strategy to convey these changes so as to keep the employees updated and to stop any rumors or misinformation from spreading within the organization.
Maintain Balance
To retain employees, organizations have to take the extra step to maintain a work-life balance. Every employee cherishes their time out of the workplace and an organization that prohibits them from that in any manner, intentionally or unintentionally, will be met with high turnover rates, even during a recession.
Professional Growth Strategies for Employee Retention
If an organization has a culture that promotes communication, conversation, feedback and honesty, employees are much more likely to stick around. Aside from their income, they also value their time, respect and happiness. If a workplace is able to provide all of these, then an employee has no reason to leave and take a risk of starting afresh in a different organization. On the other hand, a workplace culture where employees can seek feedback, improve, and be recognized for their labor is one that encourages employees to stay. Building connections with employees helps them feel supported and empowers them to grow their skillset – thus allowing them to contribute to your company in a positive way.
Employee retention is about creating and harboring a safe culture for the employees and encouraging them to live a happier, more productive life both in and out of their workplace. Are you ready to get started with effective communication? Learn how VP Legacies can help you with an internal communication strategy.
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