Everyday I hear of workshops, webinars, programs, and the like all designed to teach you how to recruit smarter and land that best candidate more effectively. The problem is, most companies, once they hire someone, are driving them away and they have no idea why.
Consider this: Every employee lost costs you $100,000 to replace!
This is a staggering number and for every 10 employees that leave you, it is erasing $1 million from your bottom line. Employee disengagement is estimated by Inc Magazine to be at about 70 percent. Fifty percent of employees are either actively or passively looking for other works, according to Forbes. Gallup believes this is costing the US economy half a trillion dollars per year.
No wonder companies are spending time, energy, and money on recruiting. Serious gaps are happening with people leaving. But the question one should ask is, what if these people never left?
What if employees felt engaged, wanted to stay with companies, and grow with them? What would that do to the bottom line of any company?
But how do you do this?
People leave companies because they do not feel listened to, understood, or valued. They do not understand the mission, vision or values of the company or how their specific efforts matter. They want to understand where the company is today, what challenges it faces, what they can do to help and how they can help achieve the overall goals and be recognized in ways that are meaningful to them.
Four factors need to be addressed to stem the tide and reduce the need for backfilling recruitment. These four factors are on-boarding, leadership, communication, and culture.
On-Boarding: Most companies do not excel at this important factor. On-boarding for many businesses consists of filling out forms, setting up the person’s office, possibly handing them business cards and handing them their first assignment. Imagine how you would feel if that was the experience you faced on your first day.
What if instead, there was a process that took weeks or months to ensure a new employee was fully integrated into the office, understood the culture, knew the key people, understood process and procedures, and had a mentor assigned to them to make sure this process is seamless?
What if on the first day, someone was there to answer all the basic questions including where the bathroom is and how to use the coffee machine? them you to people, help them set up computers, phones, and other systems? What if that person helped a new recruit feel that they belonged and mattered? Imagine how that would make them feel?
Leadership: This is another factor that is vital to ensuring employees stay and are engaged. A great leader makes people feel needed and that their work matters. They work with their teams to achieve goals and build mutual success. They coach, mentor, inspire and take the time to understand individual goals and aspirations and help those they lead achieve these objectives.
If all you have is a building full of people who manage the process and forget about the people behind that process, engagement is bound to be low and resumes will start to be distributed elsewhere.
Communication: Most companies talk at employees and not to them. They tell people what they need to get done, but forget to tell them why it is important. Mission, vision, and value statements do not help. For the most part, they are just empty words on a wall that are soon forgotten, because they are not lived by everyone. A better option is a brand story that tells where the company came from, what it does, why it does it, for whom, why those people see value in the company and most importantly, where the company is going. If every employee can turn around and tell their version of that brand story, they will internalize it. They will believe in it. If it is truly authentic, it will help them see how what they do matters and why they matter.
Culture: This is the lifeblood of the organization and has to be lived by everyone from the CEO to whoever makes deliveries for the company and everyone in-between. The culture needs to encompass the brand story and be part of on-going communication and on-boarding. People need to be hired with the culture in mind and they need to be promoted and acknowledged based upon the values of the culture.
If companies take the time to on-board properly, have great leadership, communication and culture, there is little need for back-filling of rolls and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars replacing people because they will stay, be engaged and valuable employees.
What are you doing to invest in the processes and people that will make your people champions of your brand, deliver exceptional customer experience, and make raving fans out of your clients?
