Efforts to keep your best employees happy are table stakes these days. With so many jobs available, industries across the world are watching as their best employees quit for various reasons, including better mental health benefits, higher paying careers, or schedule flexibility.
Just like you need to cater to the candidate’s experience during the hiring process, your HR department needs to pay special attention to the members already on your team. After all, you’re hiring because you need help — and the last thing you want is to lose top performers from your team.
While implementation looks different in different industries, the premise is still the same: keeping your current employees engaged and motivated so your business can continue to grow successfully. With that in mind, Hireology has analyzed the facts for you and presented a few ideas to help you keep your teams happy and your business growing in 2022.
Automotive industry
If material shortages weren’t enough of a test to your dealership, the dwindling labor force certainly didn’t help. Dealerships have been put through the ringer over the last couple of years, making retention a top priority for many.
According to a recent Hireology survey, 45% of job seekers said that the pandemic has negatively impacted their sense of loyalty to their employer — and that was why they were searching for alternative employment. That means nearly half of the current job seekers felt like their previous employers didn’t take care of their personal needs and wants.
While completely appeasing everyone on your staff is a noble goal, it’s not always pragmatic. To keep top talent at your dealership, we suggest implementing long-term efforts to keep employees engaged.
One of the most successful ways to keep your employees motivated to stay with your dealership is to offer career pathways. Some businesses find success with regular mentorship programs; for example, every six months at Hireology, we internally communicate that mentors are now available for new mentees to help grow their career. After being matched with a new mentee, the pairs spend the following six months developing a personal relationship to assist the green employee in their career and ambitions. In the dealership world, this could be implemented by partnering a new service technician with an experienced sales representative or other supervisory staff member.
How could this help your dealership? One of the primary reasons applicants with the skills and interests necessary for technician work decline these types of roles is because they can’t see a growing future at your dealership. Most dealerships don’t give these employees the educational and training opportunities needed to develop a long term career in the automotive industry, aside from manual labor. We’ve noticed among our customers that make an effort to map out career paths on the service side have managed to fill these roles faster than their competitors who do not offer the same levels of growth and advancement.
When you hand someone the key to their future and success, they remember that — which ultimately helps them develop that sense of loyalty that has been missing from the workforce recently.
Healthcare industry
Beyond the minor inconveniences in day-to-day life created by the pandemic, the last two years have been incredibly traumatizing. No industry has seen firsthand the effects of the virus nor been on the frontlines as visibly as the healthcare industry.
Whether you’re managing a team of home caregivers or CNAs, the impact of the pandemic on your staff is palpable. Burnout is a real threat to your staff; many healthcare workers have sought alternative forms of employment to get out of the industry altogether.
To keep your team motivated and improve your retention rates, let’s take a look at what respondents say was their top motivators for starting a new job search:
- 24% stated pay was the deciding factor
- 16% said COVID-19 was their catalyst
- 9% answered flexible hours and advancing career, respectively
- 8% were motivated by poor work culture
Of these responses, there are two in particular that your facility can capitalize on to retain top staff: career advancement and improving your work culture. Luckily for your business, these two aspects can work hand in hand with each other to your advantage.
One of the chief complaints expressed by healthcare professionals is a lack of appreciation, from their management to their patients. While you can’t enforce patients to treat caregivers with the respect they deserve, you can make up for any perceived slights or injustices by how you regularly treat your employees. Instead of waiting for National Caregiver Week, your HR department should make every effort to express gratitude to your employees as often as possible.
Pizza parties, unfortunately, do not make the cut. If you want your employees to feel appreciated and remain in their roles, you need to go above and beyond industry standards. To truly make a difference, you need to listen to what your employees actually want as perks and bonuses. This could mean implementing mental health days or other forms of additional PTO to mitigate the accrued stress of the job. When you take care of your employees mentally, you demonstrate that you care for them as individuals — on the job and off.
Additionally, providing clear career pathways is another way that your facility could cater to your employees. In order to improve retention rates, you need to show staff that they have a future with the company. Employees do not typically want to remain in the positions they begin in; everyone wants to improve in some way or fashion. With the healthcare field rapidly changing by the minute, it’s hard to predict what new roles may come about; however, there will always be patients that need attending.
To help employees envision a long, rewarding career at your facility, consider highlighting any staff who have already risen through the ranks in your internal communications. If your employees can see a model career path, it might be easier for them to visualize themselves in that role. You could also offer additional training and certifications — or the flexibility to pursue those opportunities on their own — to help employees gain the knowledge they need to be successful in the future.
Hospitality industry
As a customer service based industry, hospitality has certainly been dealt more than its fair share of blows following the pandemic. Occupancy rates are finally nearing pre-COVID metrics, but hoteliers are finding their staff to be wanting when it comes to the guest experience. Part of this issue is because top talent has left the hospitality industry altogether, meaning hotels are constantly operating — and training — new teams. Not including that nearly 40% of a hotel’s expenses are related to employee turnover, it’s obvious to see the impact poor retention rates have.
To accurately combat low retention rates at your hotel, we strongly recommend identifying the root issue. Sometimes, employees perceive the work environment to not be hospitable to their own needs. For other staff, the lack of career development or training and development causes them to seek careers elsewhere. There are, of course, other reasons why hoteliers can’t keep talent, but we can give you insight on these two in particular.
As part of their responsibility to provide an excellent experience, your staff deal with demands from guests daily. Your employees spend long periods of time on their feet, tending to any request, so they can cater to the guest’s stay. What do you do for them? Aside from legally mandated breaks, what perks do you give them while they’re on the clock?
In order to cultivate a better work environment, smaller inns or bed and breakfasts can provide a free meal from their kitchen during the staff’s shift or reduced pricing when they’re off the clock. For larger chains that may have franchises stationed nationwide or internationally, market any reduced travel programs you have for staff members. Everyone loves a good vacation — and saving a dollar. If your employees can imagine themselves taking a vacation at one of your sibling hotels because of the opportunity a job at your hotel gives them, you can potentially motivate them to keep their employment.
Hoteliers have targeted college graduates in recent years to supplement their recruitment efforts, but have found that these employees do not stay as long as they would like. One of the reasons for this is that those employees do not see long term employment opportunities available to them at hotels in the form of career advancement. Your hotel can capitalize on this eagerness to improve — and it all starts with onboarding.
New hires know when you set them up for success and when you’re simply training them as quickly as possible to start them in their roles. Just like with other industries, your employees want to be appreciated and cared for; they can sense when processes are rushed. Onboarding includes more than just paperwork and training videos. You’re bringing new employees into a new work culture that they know nothing about; some may have never worked in the hospitality space before and do not know all of the roles that make the hotel work as one cohesive unit. Management can use this to their advantage by using time in onboarding to dig into what makes your hotel better than others.
If your hotel does not have a mentorship program in place, we strongly recommend doing so. When employees can envision themselves advancing within the company, they have a milestone to strive toward. At the very least, your commitment to helping your employees grow professionally speaks volumes about the value your business places on them, whether they stay or seek employment elsewhere. When you invest in your staff, you’re ultimately investing in your hotel.
To sum it up
Retention rates are low across the board, but the good news is that with proper planning and implementation, your HR department can create a workplace that top talent wants to stay at. Interested in how else Hireology’s expert team and powerful all-in-one platform can help your business succeed in 2022? Schedule a demo to address your company’s pain points today!
