Don’t let valued employees get away! Give them the work environment they deserve and they’ll love coming to work every day.
Losing a valued employee can have an adverse effect on a business, especially those in specialist, niche areas, where it’s hard to find skilled employees. Not only does it mean that you have to put the business on hold while you recruit, but there’s also the time lost to you while you recruit, and there’s the cost of running recruitment adverts. The simple way to reduce the effect of losing staff is to keep staff for longer. It’s not quite that simple, but that should be your primary aim. You stand to save a lot of time and money, and you’ll also be creating a loyal and happy workforce. If you do it right, you’ll produce better work as well as better workers. An important skill worth developing is teamwork. Business owners are used to doing things and making decisions on their own; for many business owners, the ability to do what you want, when you want, was one of the main driving forces behind starting a business. Creating teams, however, is one way of reinforcing loyalty. If an employee works as part of a team that they feel happy with, the decision to move will be harder to make than if they work on their own. Additionally, people like working in teams and believe they’re more effective in them. A Vodafone survey from 2012 showed that employees were clear about the negative impacts of not working effectively as a team. The most serious of these were delayed decision-making (named by 31 percent), unhappy customers through poor response (29 percent), missing targets because of lack of timely input from colleagues (28 percent), and making the wrong decisions because of lack of access to the right people and information (28 percent). Creating teams involves understanding the different personalities in the team, and helping them work together. It also involves working in close proximity to your staff. You can’t create teams if you sit in a separate office all day. You need to get out and about, and be part of the team. Although they may carry a financial cost, staff initiative schemes can also be highly effective. A well-thought-out system of incentives and perks – discounts at stores, health benefits, and the like – can help to retain staff.
