Employee retention in today’s environment is a challenge at best. Organizations are looking at news ways to hire and retain employees. There is plenty of research on employee retention with buzz words like: Employee engagement, Gamification, Uplift and ESG. These are a few among the sea of terms used to retain employees.
How do you retain employees, increase their productivity and workplace satisfaction?
Directly engage your staff and ensure your language of leadership is more educational.
Direct engagement involves educating employees of their Return on Salary Investment (ROSI). We used this at a BMW dealership to ensure the sales staff understood why following the sales process ensures the Dealership is profitable. We set up a board to track monthly sales on one half and the other half was each salespersons sales up to that date of the month. These numbers are to benefit the sales staff. Example: Sales staff can track their minimum monthly gross profit to reach their monthly ROSI. This engagement gives the sales staff purpose and a better understanding of their important role for the business. Directly engage employees to engage their inherent need to be a part of something greater than the individual.
Language of leadership to continue the positive and productive changes.
Telling, convincing, justification is an old and outdated management style. Why are we using the same leadership language that gives the same results. Example: An employee made a mistake that will normally result in a negative write up. This does not benefit the employee and only creates animosity towards the corporation. This leads to unhappy employees resulting in higher employee turnover.
The BMW service had an issue where the service rider did not handle an important issue immediately. We walked the manager through an educational write up. They expected this to be a difficult write up but using the new technique better results was the case. The new style of write up had 3 parts. Part 1 is a very brief statement of the issue.
Part 2 is a list of the dollar amount the issue caused. Issues that caused poor customer service and workplace difficulty are listed below the dollar amount. Part 3 is a minimum of 3 to 4 sentences from the employee advising what actions they are taking to ensure this will not happen again. This interaction resulted in the employee apologizing for the issues they created. They wrote 4 sentences, and this write up was a positive exchange for them.
Employee retention starts with directly engaging employees and using an educational leadership language with employees. Employees that participate will make decisions that benefit the organization and require less management.