Monthly Archives: January 2016

7 Important steps to retain your top employees

1. Recognition

People thrive on recognition. One of the principal reasons people change jobs is that employees feel anonymous and under-appreciated.

Few companies thank their employees for their contributions. Employees need to be recognized in public.

2. Boredom

People need new challenges to grow and be their most active.

Make a well drawn up plan to rotate your creative and account employees to work with varied teams and projects. Keep your teams challenged.

3. Overwork

People that work people 60- and 80-hour weeks burn out.

Salary increases cannot resolve the issue of burnout. One reason so many of the best and brightest have left the creative marketing and advertising business is because people can make more elsewhere and work less.

4. Untrained supervisors

Leadership and management skills need to be taught and continually upgraded.

Be sure to train your supervisors daily on best practices for managing others.

Do not promote based on tenure but on the true ability to manage others.

This should include training programs designed to address the interpersonal issues that may be at the core of turnover.

Employees are motivated when they feel that their companies are investing in them.

5. Lack of loyalty

When the business climate is challenging the excellent leaders don’t just threaten lay offs and the like. They communicate with their teams to find out what to do differently to adapt to change.

6. No sense of community

Every employee needs to feel a sense of community. An annual party or a lunch is insufficient. Managers need to be encouraged to create a team spirit by engaging at least once a quarter with the team members in some semi-social engagement.

7. Retention programs are critical

Companies need to find ways to give employees incentives to stay. Eliminating raises and bonuses for an extended period of time is one of the key reasons people leave.

Keeping highly regarded employees should be priority one and it is neither difficult nor expensive. It merely requires a leader committed to act in ways that their team is their company!

Taking the right steps to the perfect hire!

Hiring the right people can be quite tricky. Unstructured interviews (those that don’t follow a set format) where you just ‘go with the flow’ stand as little as 30% chance of success.

Factor in the high cost of recruiting the wrong person (interviewing time, recruitment fee, on-boarding, induction, team familiarization, client relationships etc…) and you’ll agree it pays to be prepared!

Step 1 Set the bar

Establish what qualifications and experience is going to be the best level for the role.

Step 2 Collaborate

Involve your current team in the job description and qualifications, a fun exercise is to ask them anonymously what tasks and activities they perform that they think are counter productive to their own success. Make the new hire someone that everyone feels adds to the productivity of the team and takes some burden off the them.

Step 3 Be consistent

Come up with the master list of interview questions at each level of the screening process that every interviewee will answer and make sure they are evidence-based on past performance vs. hypothetical answers.

Step 4 See the future

Map out how you want the person to grow within your organizationin the next 2-3 years. Conveying growth opportunities to candidates will make the role more attractive to the best candidates.

Step 5 Be fair

Compensation plays a large factor in the success of your company, from increasing employee morale and decreasing your turnover rate.

We work with hiring managers daily to establish a consistent process that gets everyone to that next step.

A hire that is the right step for all.