The economy will improve and this will present challenges in both attracting talent but also retaining your existing staff.

Will your competitors be looking to attract your best staff?

Do you know the real cost of staff turnover?

The costs are often invisible and not reported but recent surveys claim that it costs 30% – 50% of the annual salary of entry level employees, 150% for mid level employees and up to a staggering 400% for specialised executive level employees!

On that basis for every mid level member of staff with an annual salary £40,000 the cost to the business in terms of lost productivity and profit is £60,000!

Sounds unbelievable until you start looking at the factors involved:

• Loss of productivity
• Management time
• Learning curve for new employee
• Lost knowledge
• Training
• Recruitment and onboarding

Some will say that staff turnover is necessary and unavoidable! To a certain extent that is right (and there are some staff who you might be happy to see go!!)

But which members of staff leave? Is it the talented, conscientious, IT developer who implemented a new workflow system that had a direct impact on productivity and bottom line profit? Or is it the negative, downbeat member of staff that is dragging down morale.

Put another way, when you are looking to attract staff from another organisation do you want to hire their best people?

So, how do you retain the right staff?

Surprisingly this isn’t always about salary it’s about making people feel part of something, valued and even proud to be part of your company.

What is the most important thing in your business?

Most people answer their customers. I disagree, it’s your staff, without a motivated and committed workforce you can’t serve your customers effectively. If your staff is the most important thing in the business treat them like it!

Five Key areas for success:

• Wherever possible give them responsibility, let them take ownership and trust them. I know its work, it’s got to be professional but don’t forget it can also be fun!
• For new staff its critical to make the right hiring decisions first time (make sure you use a great recruitment company!) and have an effective onboarding programme (that’s another post)
• Spend your Training Budget, that’s what it is there for!
• Speak to your staff. Most companies today have exit interviews. It’s probably too late at that stage to stop that person leaving but find out why they are leaving and do something about it!
• Also why not speak to your best people and find out why they stay? This combined will tell you what you need to do to retain your staff.

Written by Richard Morgan, Remit Resources

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