Businesses are operating in unchartered waters; we believe it is still important that we are listening to our employees as they are absolutely key to our continued and future success.
Here are some of our top tips:
- Manage expectations during employee onboarding, ensure career paths and performance metrics are transparent.
- Create a group of ‘listeners’ – mentors, buddies, line managers – create a structure for reporting back to the senior team or you. The team must feel comfortable to share their thoughts for this to be effective.
- Train and support line managers to spot the signs of dissatisfaction, the struggling or unhappy employee.
- Carry out employee surveys and focus on questions relating to retention. Find out what your employees want and need and make no assumptions. Share feedback and share any changes you are going to make.
- Focus on well-being and emotional resilience initiatives developing HR practices and provide training to support employees and line managers.
- Succession planning. Have a clear career path share your thoughts with the team, look at any skills gaps you have, for example, complete a training analysis to see if there is a need for management development.
- Carry out Exit Interviews and take action when necessary. If you are a small business consider asking your HR partner to carry this out so it is confidential. The HR partner can then share the topics raised in a constructive way so the business can reflect on the feedback.
- Accept what you see and hear as it is always easy to come up with a range of reasons as to why things have happened. Accept that sometimes mistakes may happen, especially during challenging periods.
- Communicate, Communicate, Communicate. In a crisis, communication is even more important. In a micro-business, you will know everyone personally, in a larger business especially with home working, flexible working and shift working you may not know/see everyone, review how best to communicate with your teams. People respond differently depending on the forms of communication, consider how you spread the message in different formats.
- Have employee retention on your agenda even in periods of crisis consider how your actions may be perceived by your team.
If you would like to learn more about retention strategies and how Guildford HR can help you and your business, please do get in touch as we would love to hear from you.
Tel: 01483 362732
Email: info@guildford-hr.co.uk
