The secret to retaining employees

Article by Alexia Pretorius

There is one question that remains a conundrum for most leaders:  How do we attract and retain top performers?

There are so many factors that contribute to the decision that an individual will consider when deciding to join and stay in your organisation. The marriage of great talent with a great organisation lies in the delicate balance of weighing up life stages vs company life cycle stage; employee vs leadership generational differences; leadership styles, cross-cultural relationships, alignment of purpose; self-leadership maturity, financial needs, emotional security and family demands.

The concept of creating a retention strategy and ensuring successful implementation is about going back to basics. It is about treating talent as valued, understood and enabled to succeed in the workplace. It is about caring and building relationships and balancing this with business needs to ensure overall organisational success.

It is about treating people as people and not as numbers or machines. It is about sincere authentic employee engagement, considering the whole person that comes to work and understanding the macro and micro factors that affect talent and their levels of satisfaction and happiness.

So how do you create a successful retention strategy? Besides the traditional strategies such as competitive salaries and benefits, flexible work schedules and reduced workdays, the absolute key is the strategic effort and purposeful commitment from top leadership downwards. They need to be committed to your company values and ethics that are the foundations for your culture. It requires all levels of leadership to understand and live a people-centric culture.

Simply put, actions need to match words.

Living and believing in your company values and ethics each day will show your true intention and authenticity that employees seek and value.

So why do most companies battle action the behaviours that lead to retention?

From my experience, it starts with losing the focus on culture when a company scales in size. It is quite easy to maintain engagement with fifty employees but when you get to two hundred employees and beyond, it becomes particularly challenging. Added to this are the challenges around lack of buy-in of company culture by employees, poor communication between employees and departments, not having the right technology, lack of growth opportunities and recognition, rigidity in work structures to name a few.

Thus, as a company grows, it remains the leader’s responsibility to keep the focus on a people-centric culture and make critical business decisions with this in mind.

Leadership has to ensure that culture does not become lip-service and that every facet of the business embodies the values and ethics of a people-centric culture. One place to start is when you recruit new employees and induct them into your business. At the recruitment stage, are you evaluating the culture fit of these new incumbents? And when you induct them, how much time are you spending on inculcating your culture and way of work with them?

So, when a new employee joins you, your onboarding strategy is the foundation for retention. One needs to invest a significant amount of time in explaining and teaching culture, so that by the time they are finished their probation periods, they will be ready to hit the ground running, be engaged, live and be able to maintain and grow the culture.

In conclusion, retaining employees is about people, relationships and building a people-centric culture and keeping the focus not just on the bottom line but on consistently maintaining strong employee engagement initiatives.