Great resignation is a real business problem and the sooner organizations realize this the better for them. A great leveler in the form of technology has come to the rescue of employees. The options of remote and hybrid job even compound and skewed the matter in favour of employees.
“I started applying for a new job the day I resumed in my new office…” The is a direct quote from a colleague that I once worked with in the past. She started complaining from the very first day she resumed, made many applications and attended many virtual interviews and left the company within Four (4) months of joining the organization.
Someone in a remote village somewhere with the right skillsets can be working a company in another continent. The boundaries are now imaginary all thanks to borderless thinkers who persevered day and night to bring us internet and other business technology management options.
Employer employee relationship should be mutually beneficial to all parties and a kind of parasitic relationship that threatens to suck the living out of workplace participants.
In this article on great resignation, I will be sharing tips on how to attract and retain great talents. I will also be sharing tips on how employees can spot and identify potential toxic working environment.
Seven (7) things that employers must get right in order to retain their best brains and create a pool of loyalists as staff members.
This section of this article on great resignation that is specifically written to help employers discover how to retain their best staff in this great resignation era gives seven practical tips that aims at creating a win-win workforce ecosystem.
- Have a proper onboarding and orientation program: nothing pisses employees off most than having to aimlessly float around in their first few weeks or days of engaging with your organization. Not having a proper employee onboarding leaves an indelible wrong first impression about the work ethics of the business. It is during the onboarding stage that vital information that would help newly engaged staff hit the ground running would be shared. It is the function of management through the human resource department to provide directions – a proper new staff onboarding scheme is a good way to staff discharging the directing function.
- Train your staff well: it is anti-productive to expect your staff to be in tune with the latest trend in their chosen field of endeavor when as an employer of labour you have failed to play your role in human capital development journey that will in the long run benefit all concerned parties. One of the best ways of creating loyal staff is to adequately train them to do their job more efficiently. Do you as an employer think that employees are happy when they struggle to deliver on the job? I bet you don’t think so.
- Have a proper job description handed over to the staff days before resumption: how do you expect and staff (old or new) to be effective and efficient when they are in the dark as to what is expected of them? I agree that some jobs have standardized job descriptions like a small business accountant JD or an internal auditor job description. However, businesses are uniquely created with unique needs. What works well for company A may be a complete failure in company B because they are differently wired. Also, having a proper JD is the foundation for performance management and appraisal. Remember that what gets measured gets done.
- Have a proper workplace security package: no worker wishes to work in a place where they are not sure of getting back home safely. Workplace security program is one of the major factors that determines for how long a staff would be in a company. Establish one today if you don’t already have one.
- Treat your staff with respect: respect is a powerful tool that the super successful businesses have used to build a formidable workforce that stands with the company come what may. You cannot expect to harvest loyalty when all you plant in the lives of your employees are disrespect and dehumanization. If you want to know who is a manager in a successful organization, look out for those that respect others, they are the true managers – not those with the job titles.
- Have a salary structure in place: having a salary structure in place ensures that no one would feel shortchanged because every level would have a package deemed fit by the manager tied to it. It is not always right to leave issue of salaries to the negotiation ability of the incoming staff. Good staff will simply walk away within a short time of joining once they discover that they are not adequately compensated compared to other staff members. Did I hear you say non-disclosure of salary clause? Please give me a break!
- Have a grievance handling procedure: bottled grievances are time bomb waiting to explode. Every staff member of your company deserved to be heard, give them an easy way of making their voices heard. Having a formal way of dealing with work related grieve ensures that a transparent and equitable work environment is created where people with ambition can thrive without fear or favour.
Five Things you must do before taking up that new job offer as an employee
- Visit the company website for general insight: as a prospective employee, the first place you should be visiting is the company website. Browse through it for information relating to staff welfare and their mission statement.
- Visit workplace review sites like glassdoor: no organization can completely hide everything that it does to its employees in this day and age. A simple check on glassdoor.com will reveal a lot about the company you intend working for.
- Interact with an ex-employee of the company on linkedin.com: you maybe walking into a trap if you are not very careful. Linkedin.com is an online community where you will find at least a staff of a company. I would take it as a major red flag if I don’t see any staff working for an organization linkedin.com. Contact them for useful first-hand insights.
- Be sure you to have a self-improvement plan: you will be doing yourself a very big disservice if you just ignore your self-improvement efforts. You will naturally get tired of yourself if your organization does not get rid of you.
- Have a chat with the security personnel: the security personnel at the gate hold very valuable information about a company’s attrition rate that the management and the HR may not be willing to release to you. Just be nice to them, they will give you some useful insight on what to expect.
Employers should know that the era of enslaving employees has long passed. People now have options. A disgruntled staff would come to work, use your network infrastructure to attend interviews. They no longer need to take time off work in order to attend interviews. Someone once said that companies should strive to get the best staff, train them to become better that every other company would be dying to posh them, but treat them so well that the idea of leaving will even cross their mind.
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