Our team at B2E Solutions recently hosted a client roundtable focused on exploring the biggest issues facing employers today. Among the topics that surfaced, employee retention led to a particularly lively conversation. There was healthy discourse, as everybody acknowledged employee retention is a challenge, but participants were also quick to offer insight on strategies that they’ve seen work.
It doesn’t matter what terms the media applies to the job market: “The Great Resignation,” “Quiet Quitting” or “Act Your Wage.” HR is expected to maintain business as usual in the face of an ever-changing workforce landscape. To keep up with hiring, compensation, career progression and performance management, HR finds itself so busy steadying the wheel of day-to-day operations that it rarely finds time to stop and question it all.
The insights gained from our roundtable discussion are clear: A reactive approach to HR simply doesn't work anymore. Our roundtable cohort shared a range of proactive employee retention measures that we, in turn, would like to share with you.
Retention strategies for recruiting
According to figures from a survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the average cost per new hire is approaching $4,700. Moreover, HR professionals know that the real cost of hiring extends well beyond a dollar amount. Factor in time spent throughout the entire process, and that number rapidly starts to increase.
Making sure you bring on the right people is a critical cost-saving measure and first step in your retention efforts. Your new hires must not only meet the job requirements, but they must also be a cultural fit with your company. Otherwise, you may find yourself back at square one looking for the next-best hire — again.
Here are the most insightful recruiting highlights generated by our roundtable participants:
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Referral programs: Implementing referral programs can entail short-term costs such as cash rewards and PTO bonuses. However, by incentivizing existing employees to refer qualified applicants, you're gaining a strategic advantage. Referrals often have a deeper understanding of your work culture and are typically pre-vetted, positioning them favorably compared to other applicants.
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Job fairs within the community: This is an opportunity to reinforce your company as an important part of your neighborhood, town or city. Fellow citizens already have a vested interest in their community. By positioning your company as a part of the local fabric, you can begin to lay the foundation in building trust and connection with potential candidates.
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Open house or weekly walk-in interviews and tours: This is especially important in manufacturing, as removing barriers and mystique to your operation helps applicants put a face (or many smiling faces) to your organization. Equipment demos and same-day interviews offer a proactive – and a delightfully surprising – level of candidate engagement.
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Constant communication: Active participation in the recruitment process keeps prospective employees out of the dark. Your ability to retain employees starts the moment you meet a potential new hire, making strong communication essential from the beginning. This is where roundtable participants talked specifically about how our human capital management (HCM) solution, UKG Ready, can differentiate a company’s communication efforts by opening efficient communication doors. Among examples mentioned, auto-triggered notifications, direct-to-applicant emailing, mass emailing and customizable checklists were at the top of the list.
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Sourcing from schools: There are areas to leverage for hiring beyond the usual professional circles. Of course, you want to target the talent pool graduating from school. However, by forging a relationship with those still in school, you can build a strong foundation for the future. Target high schools, trade schools, internship opportunities and state programs for specific trades by taking out back-to-school ads and offering flexible scheduling to work around class schedules.
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Job board optimization: Leveraging job boards in a way that allows you to build and post job listings in a fast, repeatable way is important, as it gets you in front of candidates and gives you the best opportunity to find a good-fit. Having a strong internal process is helpful, but technology also plays a pivotal role in facilitating speed and repetition. Integrations, such as our UKG Ready Indeed integration, help organizations take advantage of this key job board with greater efficiency and ease.
Retention strategies for onboarding
Our roundtable discussion discovered an important truth about onboarding. HR can become so caught up in remaining compliant during the onboarding process that they can lose focus on delivering a lasting experience. You only get one chance to make a first impression.
These crucial first few days of employment may require more hand holding than previously thought. Departments are often guilty of rushing a new hire’s time to productivity, which inadvertently creates a sink-or-swim atmosphere. Decreased engagement leads to low worker satisfaction and, consequently, higher turnover ratios.
When you make employee retention a priority, new hires can seamlessly transition from day one to year one — and beyond. Thinking about onboarding strategically, instead of transactionally, involves some out-of-the box thinking and a little help from an HCM technology like UKG Ready.
Here are some onboarding strategies that B2E clients offered up during the roundtable:
- Pre-boarding dashboard: An employee dashboard called Company Hub has long been a feature of the UKG Ready suite. A similar dashboard is available to help new hires feel comfortable before their official start date. By making information available prior to the first day of work, a new hire can get a jump on learning about benefits, job specifics and protocols. By providing checklists in advance, you can incentivize employees to check off actionable items from their own procedural pre-hire list.
- Mobile app for onboarding: People are accustomed to doing a lot on their mobile devices, so give them the experience they want. Leveraging mobile tools like the UKG Ready app allows new hires to accomplish onboarding tasks ranging from completing HR forms to viewing onboarding dashboards, submitting required paperwork, completing checklists and more.
- Virtual reality tours: Virtual reality tours can significantly contribute to employee retention by providing new hires with an immersive experience that reduces apprehension and fosters a sense of belonging from the outset. By offering a glimpse into their new company environment, including department-specific areas, these tours help manage expectations and instill confidence in new employees, ultimately enhancing their engagement and likelihood of staying with the company.
- Personalized welcome videos: The generic, catch-all welcome video from the president or CEO can come across as stilted and impersonal. A welcome video from new coworkers or managers, on the other hand, can have a profound personal impact on a new hire. These welcome videos can be made for little-to-no cost. As a bonus, the casts of these videos develop pride in being company ambassadors.
- Feedback and surveys: Collect real-time feedback on the onboarding process using surveys, like those available through UKG Ready, to gauge the new hire's experience during initial weeks. This sets a positive tone and reinforces that you’re providing a workplace that cares about what its people think.
- Mentorships: This is a win-win retention strategy. On one hand, the mentee has a sounding board and guide for navigating the workplace — especially important in the beginning. On the other hand, the mentor gains a sense of responsibility and ownership in fostering the new hire. At the end of the day, both employees are feeling more fulfilled and committed to your organization.
Offboarding is critical in retention too.
Employee turnover is inevitable to some degree, but there's also a lot you can learn from employees who've decided to leave. Here's how to gain invaluable insights from exit interviews.
Ongoing retention strategies to nurture employees
From hire to retire. That is the aspirational dream scenario for all HR departments. Throughout an employee’s lifecycle at your company, it’s important that the time, money and resources that you invest in recruiting and onboarding a new hire will result in an employee who continues to deliver ongoing value to your organization.
One recurring theme of our roundtable discussion was: It’s not always about the compensation. Sure, that’s a big part of it, but sustaining an environment for employees to remain (and hopefully flourish) is the bread and butter of what HR does.
The roundtable unanimously agreed that cultivating a positive company culture was more impactful than increasing wages. They emphasized these strategies to help:
- Feedback: Communication is a two-way street. Employees need to know that their voice is heard and appreciated. Surveys, like those offered through UKG Ready, allow you to create, customize and distribute multi-question polls to employees. These surveys not only allow you to quickly collect and evaluate information and trends, but they also provide employees with an easy way to share their thoughts and opinions — a critical part of the retention puzzle.
- Employee recognition: It’s nice to be noticed. If a good deed, model behavior or goal is achieved, recognizing employees can go a long way with your retention efforts. Brag-board shout-outs, cross-department acknowledgement and upper-management awareness are all effective in making an employee feel special and important. Leveraging the various communication capabilities available through UKG Ready is one way to make employee recognition a more ingrained part of your workflows and processes.
- Stay interview: A reactive approach to retention waits until the exit interview to understand what was successful and what didn’t work. While a thoughtful exit interview will certainly garner valuable information, it’s not stopping that person from leaving. That’s where a stay interview comes into play. By asking evaluation-type questions, management can understand in real time what employees like about their job and what they would like to change. This is all part of cultivating an ongoing healthy manager-to-employee relationship and allows you to respond before it’s too late.
- Company events: Hosting events for employees is a highly effective retention strategy. Utilizing tools like the UKG Ready Company Hub enables employers to easily promote these events to their workforce. With features like an in-system event calendar and messaging capabilities, employers can inform employees about fun activities like theme days, pop-ups, off-campus parties, seasonal celebrations and more.
- Training: Investing in continuous training is a no-brainer for retention. From line employees to associates, managers and everyone in between, everybody benefits from training. Solutions like UKG Ready make it much easier for employers to define and schedule employee training and track attendance, along with other employee credentials and certifications. This makes it easier for employers to support employee enrichment and growth opportunities, while staying organized.
When people thrive, business grows
It’s clear that employee retention is top of mind for most organizations. Forces outside of your control have altered the employee-company dynamic, making it that much harder to hold on to quality employees. By leveraging insights from our wonderful clients, you can recruit, onboard and nurture employees with a focus that’s sure to help you retain employees for the long-haul.
Strategies for retaining employees come in degrees, and deciding exactly how far you should go from a human to a systematic approach requires balance. An HCM technology like UKG Ready keeps your organization in balance by automating tasks, streamlining communication and, ultimately, supporting you as the “human” in HR.
Delivering solutions to facilitate stronger business-to-employee connection is what we do best (hey, it’s right there in our B2E name!). Have questions about how UKG Ready can help you take your retention strategies to the next level? Contact us today.
