Why You Need An Employee Retention Plan and Strategy

The cost to a company of losing talent is often underestimated – but it shouldn’t be. Often, companies are so focused on “filling a vacancy” or “making a hire” that they forget how important it is to keep that new hire working, productive, and inspired – for years to come. It’s important to have an employee retention plan and strategy in place.

Employee retention happens when you deliver on your promise to employees. An effective employee value proposition (EVP) summarizes your promise to employees and is weaved into the fabric of your corporate culture.

It’s important to uncover your employee value proposition (EVP) and then live and breathe it so that it is an authentic part of your culture and core to your employee retention plan and strategy.

Here are three key areas that many companies need to improve to enhance their employer brand and increase their retention to grow the bottom line.

Comradeship and true friendship between colleagues.

Your employees’ team is their family, they have fun with each other, and share in each others’ personal lives so much, they derive great personal value from these relationships.

When an organization feels proud of its family-minded atmosphere, it needs to ensure it has programs in place that really nurture these relationships, and help them grow. Cultivating these deep connections not only promotes collaboration and trust between your teams and across the organization, it breaks down interdepartmental silos and other barriers.

What practices can enhance friendship on your teams? To name a few – on-boarding retreats; team dinners and outings; after-work special interest clubs (fitness, book club, company rock band, curling, bowling, dinner clubs, cooking, etc.) Any events that bond your employees over their shared interests create lifelong relationships play a vital role in talent retention.

Management that has a genuine interest in the employee experience and the growth of their teams.

That may sound obvious at first, but bad managers are perhaps the single biggest challenge that organizations face when it comes to engagement, retention, and employer brand reputation. There are plenty of people programs and engagement initiatives that HR launches annually to try and fix engagement. But mid-level management, which has the greatest daily, direct impact on talent, and the least amount of experience in developing that talent, is often provided with little or no training and mentoring on delivering a great employee experience. What we typically uncover is that some are just naturally great managers and talent loves them. Others, who may have excellent technical skills but aren’t creating a culture that delivers on the employee promise, or EVP, create an enormous risk for employee engagement and organizational turnover.

In turn, there is a wide gap in employee experience across any given organization. Practices that enhance consistency in great people management include providing mid-level management with workshops, living your brand training, and mentorship. These are all critical to driving retention, and to elevating your company’s performance.

The Employee Value Proposition and Employer Brand are not seen as HR projects, but are embedded throughout the culture.

To achieve consistently high employee engagement, your organization needs to seek ongoing feedback from employees and leadership, and not just conduct an annual survey. Not only should your employees be encouraged to share their thoughts on continuous feedback, they should be recognized for great ideas.

It’s critical for your talent to see that the leadership team considers culture and employee experience equal in importance to all other company strategic objectives. To that end, all levels of management should have KPIs to hold them accountable for their role in building a great workplace culture. These include KPIs for employee turnover.

Leadership needs to transparently share results – both positive and negative – with all employees, on a regular basis.

Practices that enhance this include: recognition for the biggest contributors to engagement and employee experience, monthly or quarterly surveys, quarterly reviews of employer brand reputation and internal employer brand ambassador programs.

We have seen many of our clients experience a jump of up to 40% in their annual employee engagement scores, and a drop in undesirable turnover of up to 20%, simply because they decided to invest in employer branding.

Organizations successfully implementing an effective employer brand strategy are tracking the impacts and can show the results to their bottom line. And who doesn’t want a company where people are happier, more engaged and business is booming?

For more information about this blog, employer brand best practices, employee retention and engagement plans or general inquiries, talk to one of our Managing Directors today by reaching us at info@bluivygroup.com or calling us at 647-308-2352

About Blu Ivy Group

Blu Ivy Group is the leading employer branding agency and employee engagement consultancy in North America. Blu Ivy Group’s mission is to help client’s build award-winning people practices, inspire extraordinary employee engagement, and cultivate unique and desirable workplaces.

Blu Ivy Group provides integrated solutions in employer brand and engagement research, strategic consulting, employer brand activation, change management, creative and talent communications.

Blu Ivy Group is a trusted partner to many of North America’s most respected employer brands.