Month: June 2019

When looking at employee retention trends, it’s critical to recognise that your HR department might not have any data on your employees. If they do, you might see the average retention rate for your company in the 40-60% range and you want to figure out if it’s more in the 60% range or the 40% range.

Keep in mind that it takes many, many rounds of layoffs or transfers to realize that these employees will leave your company – and if you can’t retain them, what incentive or reward are you going to give the ones who remain?

For example, if you hire a new recruiter but you only have 2 people from your past employees who are still employed, how can you expect to have any kind of success with your new hires?

I want you to meet the staff you already have – who are about to quit. 

They came in super engaged. They came in with a million ideas. They came in with an absolute fire to achieve, and to play a part in your company’s future.

And now they’re tired. And they’re frustrated. They roll their eyes at new initiatives, and their defining quote is, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

They’re good at their jobs, but they don’t care enough to be great.

They’re worn down, they’re worn out and they’re wearing out their welcome.

It’s not their fault. It’s not your fault. But it’s the result of a disengaged workforce who either haven’t been given the opportunity to be directly and positively engaged and fulfilled, or they haven’t been given the means.

If the company can’t offer a decent package of benefits to its employees, then the staff aren’t going to be pleased. And if a company can’t find a way to give employees the right information and make interacting with their managers and with the organisation easy, people are going to feel like they aren’t and cannot be heard.

The thing is, we always imagine the staff that are going to churn are the squeaky wheels. 

But that’s not necessarily the case. The staff who are the noisiest are sometimes the ones who are the most secure, and the most comfortable, and the most likely to stick around. That’s why they’re the ones making the noise in the first place!

The staff who you don’t hear from, the staff who are quietly becoming more and more unhappy, are the ones who are actually in danger of throwing in the towel. And you might not even realise it until they’re long, long gone. 

It’s not about waiting for these people to be frustrated enough to bail, and then trying to move the needle on a bunch of initiatives to stop the churn. That’s not going to be proactive, and you’ll lose good people along the way. The right time to be thinking about ways to make these quietly unhappy staff more comfortable is right now, before any of them pull the plug. 

So what can you do?

•  There’s no way you’ll regret having open and honest conversations with your staff, on a regular basis, to get a sense check of where they’re at. Up to a certain size of business, this works wonders. At Flare, our co-founders conduct regular one on one sessions with the staff just to keep their fingers on the pulse and maintain contact with the team!
• If you’re a business with thousands of employees, that’s not going to be as possible. Nobody can speak to that many folks, even if just conducting one on one sessions was their full time job. That’s where having more scalable options and programs comes in…
• We’re always going to be huge advocates of a good benefits platform and an amazing onboarding experience as the answer to questions of scale. For example, we encourage folks to use our onboarding system to re-onboard their current employees to get them back up to date with the company and give them a chance to be heard!
• Benefits are such a key part here; the right benefits program can do so much to engage your staff and make them feel like they’re a part of something supportive, qualitative and caring. It can mean the world to your folks if they feel like what they do matters enough to you to care about offering benefits that impact them outside of the workforce too! 

When I first started working out of college, I had a moment where I started to understand my job as being more than just a paycheck. As soon as I saw the idea of “culture” being developed in my organisation, I knew I had to be involved. I had my dream: I was going to create a culture that would be highly rewarding, exciting, and innovative.

I felt that my job was to help my company develop an ecosystem for our brand, our culture, and our team members to thrive and contribute. My mission was to make the team of “culture” understand and respect our values, to cultivate friendship for the team, and to make our company accessible; it would also enhance the team.

Over the next few years, in every job I’ve had, I have worked tirelessly, at times through many layers of layers, trying to get a good picture of culture in my organisation to better understand and apply lessons and ideas. I have had to understand the culture, to help people understand our culture, to make our culture more engaging, interactive, creative, and enjoyable, and, to support our culture through good communication, positive feedback, and by having fun.

I have been determined to create and share a culture without borders for all our people as a team.

Ultimately, I’m the one who has to work in this company. And if I just sit around and expect the founders to magic up some culture without my input, without my care and compassion and involvement and without my effort, that’s not going to be fair on them, fair on my co-workers or successful for me, personally.

And that’s what being a part of a growing company is all about: Taking an active part in the culture.

I don’t think company culture can come from just the activities your boss organises, or a mundane “casual friday” or a string of fancy sounding words. It comes from the individual people who are empowered enough to care about the culture and make it their own, whether that’s through organising, spending quality time, or just working with each other to reach for something better and bigger.

1. People need to have the ability to do this.

The one thing founders and business owners and managers have to do is actually give their staff the ability to be involved with the culture. Give them the opportunity to come up with parts of it and evolve it. You have to look at a company’s culture as a patchwork blanket, and allow new folks to sew themselves and their values and ideas into the fabric alongside yours. Do your people have the budget to organise company events? Do they have the freedom and flexibility to spend time on culture? Do they have resources? All of these are going to make a difference.

2. People need to *know* they have the ability to do it

It’s one thing to say that people in your company can impact the culture, can access your benefits, can be a positive and pro-active part of the organisation and can stand up and be counted. But do they know it? So many companies seem to wind up with benefits, culture and policies that people aren’t even aware of, that people can’t take advantage of because they’ve never even been told they exist.

If you can communicate to your folks that you walk the walk, and that they have the real and tangible chance to impact and shape the culture, that will allow them to be the change makers themselves. And you can’t just say it once; you have to be prepared to say it over and over again!

3. People need to know that you see the ROI

Your culture is not going to be healthy if your staff think that you don’t understand the win that an amazing culture actually represents. 

If your staff think that your ROI focus is on productivity alone, profitability alone, they won’t believe that you’re serious about creating an incredible culture, and so they won’t want to take part in it. The right people for the jobs you’re offering are people who care about the same goals as you, and where they sense that you don’t have a serious culture goal, they will follow your lead. What’s the ROI on a culture? It’s your staff’s health. Happiness. Dedication. Longevity. Positivity. Belief in the mission and vision.

Believe me, all of those things will flow into having a hugely positive impact on the bottom line, but you have to look at culture as being such a huge win even beyond that. That’s the real opportunity.