From interviewing for retention to practicing what you preach, here are tips for retaining employees in a post-pandemic workplace.
- Conduct Retention Interviews
- Set Up Internal Development Programs
- Involve Your Team in Decision-making
- Offer a Health and Wellness Edge
- Develop Effective Onboarding
- Keep Your Salary and Benefits Package Competitive
- Grow Mentorship Programs
- Provide Bespoke Training Budgets
- Make Work Fun and Rewarding
- Drum Up More Candidate Referrals
- Make Sure Employees Are Aware of Their Rights
- Recognize and Respect Individuality
- Grant Free Tech Upgrades
- Survey Employee Satisfaction Twice a Year
- Encourage a Sense of Pride
- Double Down on Flexibility
- Walk Your Talk
Conduct Retention Interviews
Don't wait until an employee decides to "exit" before conducting an interview! Be proactive and conduct "retention interviews." Schedule time with employees one-on-one and ask open-ended questions about what they like and dislike about their jobs, why they are staying, what would entice them to leave, as well as suggestions for improving the work environment.
Brian Stinson, Culture Engineer, The Peak Fleet
Set Up Internal Development Programs
Develop internal mobility programs to reskill and upskill employees who want to grow within the company. Plenty of organizations never grow their employees internally and miss out on cheaper, intuitive opportunities to promote from within and maximize employee satisfaction.
Especially since the beginning of the pandemic, professionals have been more attuned to their career paths and goals than ever before. Many employees crave the challenges and opportunities that come from climbing the corporate ladder within an organization but are stunted by the lack of programs or transparency a company offers.
To avoid transparency issues and empower your employees, subsidize their growth within your organization. Businesses will benefit from increased satisfaction, retention, and a larger talent pool to choose from when high-skill roles become available.
Guna Kakulapati, Co-Founder & CEO, CureSkin
Involve Your Team in Decision-Making
If you want your employees to stick around for the long haul, they need more than just compensation to keep them going—they need a sense of purpose and belonging.
To invoke this feeling, organizations need to reaffirm to their workforce the role they play in the bigger picture, which can often be done by getting them involved in the decision-making process—especially when these decisions affect their workforce directly. This ensures that your employees feel heard and know that their opinions are taken seriously, rather than being treated as mere cogs in the machine.
Harry Morton, Founder, Lower Street
Offer a Health and Wellness Edge
A significant difference between a pre-pandemic and post-pandemic candidate is the latter simply won't compromise on health and wellness. Before the pandemic, the health and wellness benefits a company offered were seldom a priority for a candidate on the lookout for a job position. If the pay and position matched their expectations, it mattered little if the company even had an existing wellness plan for its employees.
Today, the availability of these offerings is easily one of the most critical criteria that helps influence candidates' decisions. Creating and implementing a customized and impactful health and wellness solution is an impactful addition to a company's employee retention blueprint. In many cases, it may even influence an employee's decision to shift to another employer that offers better plans and takes better care of its employees.
Riley Beam, Managing Attorney, Douglas R. Beam, P.A.
Develop Effective Onboarding
To me, onboarding is a crucial part of an employee's growth and the first chance a new worker has to learn the ropes of the business. Plan the onboarding process so that new hires spend time both working with key departments and mingling with other employees. Assigning a point person for each recruit who can act as a mentor and check in and answer questions might be helpful as well.
Gerrid Smith, Chief Marketing Officer, Joy Organics
Keep Your Salary and Benefits Package Competitive
Keeping employees in a post-pandemic workplace can be challenging, but offering a competitive salary and benefits package can go a long way in attracting and retaining top talent.
To determine what is competitive in your industry and region, it is important to conduct market research and consider the needs and preferences of your employees. Regularly reviewing and adjusting your salary and benefits packages can help to ensure that you are staying up to date with changing market conditions and meeting the needs of your workforce.
Additionally, be sure to communicate the details of your packages transparently and consider offering a range of benefits that are tailored to the needs and interests of your employees.
Bill Lyons, CEO, Griffin Funding
Grow Mentorship Programs
Offer mentorship programs to employees. We rarely see it outside of corporate work environments, but mentorship provides dual opportunities to companies and individuals by streamlining professional development and outlining a progress map for employees with specific professional goals in mind.
Mentorship offers employees guidance, workarounds, and expertise that helps professionals grow into their roles or industry. It can also be a useful method for brands to keep tabs on and best support employees’ development or goals. Especially in the past few years, when many professionals are reevaluating their career paths and standards, mentorship is invaluable for helping build those trajectories back up while benefiting brands’ retention efforts.
Kevin Miller, Founder, Kevinmiller.Com
Provide Bespoke Training Budgets
One of the best methods of retention is to provide bespoke training budgets and to actively show your staff that you really care about their personal development. It's not enough to simply provide generic training that only covers a small part of their role. Ensure that you provide that budget and get each employee's bespoke training requirements they will benefit from greatly, which will enable them to advance in their role.
Tracey Beveridge, HR Director, Personnel Checks
Make Work Fun and Rewarding
Creating a fun and rewarding work environment can help to retain employees, foster positive company culture, and attract top talent. By building a sense of community and belonging within the business, employees may be more likely to view the company as an "extended family" and be more motivated to support its success. Because when employees enjoy their work, they are more likely to be engaged and motivated, which can lead to increased productivity and job satisfaction, and lower turnover rates.
Creating a sense of community and belonging within a business can help to foster a strong company culture. If you can make work fun and rewarding, you can build a reputation for being an enjoyable place to work and share that culture on your social media accounts.
Brian Hawkins, Marketing Manager, GhostBed
Drum Up More Candidate Referrals
In a post-pandemic workplace, many organizations will continue to stay fully remote. When employees don't feel connected to the company, there is less friction in resigning.
Our organization has leaned on recruiting more heavily from employee referrals. More than half of our team has worked together before at a previous company pre-pandemic. This strategy has increased employee engagement across the company and staff and is responsible for an average tenure of 2.5x our peers.
Gordana Sretenovic, Co-Founder, Workello
Make Sure Employees Are Aware of Their Rights
One tip for retaining employees in a post-pandemic workplace is to ensure they are aware of their rights as employees, and that they know how to access resources if they need to.
It is important to create a sense of community within your team and make sure everyone feels like they can ask questions and get answers. A good way to do this is by creating an open forum where employees can talk about anything they feel like—whether it is legal advice or tips on how to get their work done more efficiently.
Andrew Griffith, Owner, Garden Furniture.
Recognize and Respect Individuality
Create a culture that recognizes and respects each person's unique value. Employees want to work for companies that value their individuality. They don't want to conform to everyone else around them or keep their mouths shut. Their hope is for their employer to celebrate their differences and invite them to speak their opinion in matters both large and small. If you want to retain employees in a post-pandemic workplace, let them know their individual voices matter.
Kim Walls, CEO & Co-Founder, Furtuna Skin
Grant Free Tech Upgrades
Free equipment and upgrades are one of the best ways to improve employee retention. Equipping employees with top-of-the-line gear shows that (A) the company values their talent and (B) they want to enable them to achieve their maximum potential with the best technology out there. Outdated technology sends neither message and will only frustrate and inhibit employees' productivity.
Annu Daniel, CEO, Elohim Company
Survey Employee Satisfaction Twice a Year
In our company, we believe our employees are our first customers, so we place a high value on their well-being. With that said, we conduct an employee satisfaction survey twice a year.
This practice aims to identify which areas in their work life we can improve on since, as remote employees, we do not see them in person. This also aims to determine if the current salary matrix is enough to cover their living costs humanely. Employee satisfaction surveys basically give us a glimpse of what the company can do to improve their well-being since we believe that motivated and happy employees will lead to a more successful company.
Jeff Moore, CEO, Everyday Power
Encourage a Sense of Pride
Employees take pride in an employer with great company culture. Employers help inspire this sense of pride with superb leadership and policies that prioritize the needs and values of their remote workers—a concept that has only become more important in the post-pandemic workplace.
Pride in an employer leads to more productive employees who are motivated to do great work. An employee who feels good about where they work is also more likely to be engaged and loyal to the brand; retaining employees is easier.
Employers can help employees take pride in themselves by giving them more responsibility and opportunities to expand their skill set. Extra responsibilities offer valuable chances for progression and even more opportunities to feel a sense of pride and fulfillment in their work.
Dakota McDaniels, Chief Product Officer, Pluto
Double Down on Flexibility
Flexibility is the office perk that everyone finds value in. Some employees enjoy working in an office environment, others prefer remote, and the rest prefer a hybrid option. Normalizing asynchronous work schedules when needed is another way to improve flexibility.
A flexible working environment offers your employees the ability to better balance work and life. Many employees will trade compensation and other perks for a work culture that champions flexibility.
Katelyn Harris Lange, Sr. Talent Sourcer, SeekOut
Walk Your Talk
The answer may seem overly simplistic, but if you want to create followers who believe in your mission, Walk Your Talk! So if your firm is focused on DEI, for example, find every way to carry this mission throughout your organization both internally and externally.
You will need to continuously ask yourselves what more we should be doing for our employees, key stakeholders, and customers. Every decision you make must have DEI woven into the answer.
Angela Bartling, Director, HR Relationship Management, Public Consulting Group
Learn more about how Maricopa Corporate College can support HR professionals in administering career training and professional development programs.
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