Is Employee Retention and Engagement giving you a headache?

Over here in Yorkshire, the last few years have seen some significant changes to the way we work with ever-changing expectations from team members, and we are all currently experiencing some key people challenges.

Do any of these resonate with you …

• Worrying about losing the great people you have working for you to your competitors
• Constantly feeling that people have different demands and expectations from you
• Concerned about how you are going to recruit your next person with the current talent shortage across Yorkshire
• People complaining about different work ethics due to the multitude of generations in the workplace
• No matter what you seem to implement, it’s never enough or not the right support for everyone. As they say over here in Yorkshire, “you can’t please all the people all the time”

On top of this, for over a decade now we have been talking about the link between employee engagement and productivity which has been a well-researched area where there is clear evidence that if we don’t engage our people, it will affect our bottom line.  And we are seeing this in Yorkshire right now.

So, where on earth do you start?   This is one of the biggest headaches we hear our Yorkshire business owners and leaders talking about at our employee retention workshops that we hold each month at Forest Farm Business Park in York.

So here are Pro-Development’s top tips for helping to both retain and engage your people: –

1. Understand what engagement looks like in your business – identifying what you are doing well and what you can improve on will make a huge difference.  Doing this through a confidential staff survey run by an external facilitator can help give your team the support needed to share honestly and openly what they need to feel engaged.
2. Work to become an employer of choice – with the market as it is, standing out from your competitors will be important.  We’ve worked hard for many years on customer satisfaction but now is the time to focus on employee satisfaction.  You really want people to choose you.  Consider how you are making yourself attractive to a future employee.  What are people saying about your business to the outside world?  Are your team great advocates of your business and encouraging people to join?  If someone spoke to one of your team members, what would they say about working for you and your business?
3. Recruit the right people aligned to values – our saying at Pro-Development is that nobody is better than the wrong body!  And we’ve probably all experienced the pain of not finding the right one.  So, when you look to recruit, use your values to find people who align to what is important to you.  And if you don’t have any values in place, or you do but they are just on the website or stuck on the wall, find a way to bring them to life and ensure you and your team are living by them.  Then find others who can do the same.
4. Deliver consistent and regular two-way communication – from team meetings to sharing your vision, communication is the key to everything.  In the famous words of Tony Hadley from Spandau Ballet, make sure you don’t fall into the trap of “communication let me down”.  Make sure your people have a voice, listen and take action or if you can’t, let them know why not.  And whatever you do, make sure it is regular and consistent – we hear so often how “we have a team meeting every week, but it never happens”!  Also think about your vision for the business too – are people clear on where you are heading and are you communicating this regularly and helping people to connect to their sense of purpose?
5. Make time for people and hold regular 1:1s – linked to communication but even more important is time for 1:1s with the team.  And again, make sure these happen.  There is nothing worse that knowing that you should have them, but your manager always cancels them because something is “more important”.  Just take time, once a month ideally, to check in with the team member.  Ask them, “How are you doing”, “How are you really doing”, “What is going well,” “what are you finding more challenging”, “how are you developing”, “what support do you need, if any” and “do you have any feedback for me”.
6. Ensure people feel valued and supported – we find in our employee engagement surveys that this nearly always falls into the bottom 3 of 11 drivers we use to measure engagement.  It’s a tough one because we are all different.  But that is the point.  You need to know what each person in your team needs to feel valued and supported.  Why not ask them this in your next 1:1 with them?
7. Build trust and connection through honest conversations – Trust is the foundation of any high performing and engaged team.  What are you doing to build trust and connection with your team?  Do you take time to get to know your people well and understand what makes them tick?  Hybrid working is causing some issues around connection, so how are you finding ways to bring the team together to help foster a culture of trust and connection?
8. Develop strong talent and succession plans – these are key to the success of any business yet many businesses in our region have no talent and succession plan in place.  This should fall off the back of your appraisals/review process (and if you don’t have one this could be a problem for you).  Make sure you ask the right questions in this process, and it should feed into your talent and succession plan which you should be reviewing twice a year.  It should highlight your risks, your successors, your talent gaps and how you are developing people.
9. Have strong leaders and managers – engagement of your team and many of the above points rely on you having strong leaders and managers in your team.  We come across so many what we call “accidental managers” who have been promoted because they were valued and skilled in their business.  But this doesn’t necessarily mean they have the skills to manage and lead others!  Provide opportunities first to help people see if this route is right for them and suits their skill set and then, invest in them (see below).

10. Invest in developing skills and career – interestingly, only 17% of SMES invest in their leaders and managers and yet we know that they are key to engagement. So, make sure you invest in developing them.  But this is the case for everyone.  In research recently, lack of development was sighted as one of the key reasons people were leaving their job.  Make sure everyone in your team is developing in at least 3 areas – this might be on the job, through mentoring or more formal training.

If you’d like to know more, we are run an Employee Retention and Engagement Workshop once a month at Forest Farm Business Park and any Growth Hub reader is welcome as a guest.  Just click here for more information and book your place.

Next dates:

26^th September 2024

23rd October 20204

4th December 2024

Or you can contact Pro-Development directly on 01904 628838, email info@pro-development.co.uk or call in for a catch up and let us know what we can do for you.

Also, keep an eye out for some proper Yorkshire blogs coming your way this month from our team all about employee retention and engagement.