Providing a perfect organization that staff won’t want to leave

Richard Branson, owner of Virgin once said that in order to keep your staff, you should provide job satisfaction and a workplace that makes it impossible to leave. And he means that in  a good way!

We’d all like our staff to remain within the company for as long as possible. Not only to save time on recruiting but you’ll likely have a talented bunch of people working for you and contributing a lot to the success of a business. However, there are plenty of things that you can do in order to provide that perfect organization that staff won’t want to leave.

Offer career progression

With most staff members, many will want to be able to grow and progress in the role. They may have entered into the business in the mindset that they’d be able to develop themselves and to climb up the career ladder of the company. So when they find out that there’s no career progression or the organization isn’t entertaining the idea of creating roles or offering promotions, you’re bound to lose staff members. Some businesses cannot provide this for reasons relating to financial costs or resources. However, that should be something that’s communicated at the interview stage if the staff member asks about progression within the company.

When it comes to career progression, you want to be open and honest about what’s available. As the company grows, that might change, so just be real with them on what you can offer right now and in the near future. It might be worth using their annual reviews as an opportunity to sit down with them, to review their progress and maybe offer a promotion if it seems warranted.

Communicate with them fully

Communication is essential for most things in life. When there’s effective communication, there’s less cause for things to go wrong. And this is something you need to have in your business, not just for managers and their staff but between departments. Things can often get lost in the translation of messages, and emails and so the most effective communication is to have it in person. Meetings can often take up the bulk of your day, so try to make these meetings perfect and more effective by trying to get them done more quickly, putting a time limit on certain ones where it’s maybe just a chance to catch-up or update colleagues on other projects going on in the organization. Staff meetings are effectively to get the whole company involved with relaying their work that’s been happening over the past few months. If everyone has an understanding of what’s going on in the business, then there’s going to be more clarity on what everyone’s roles are.

Reward hard work

Your staff undeniably work hard for your organization and for the number of hours that they put in, a lot of staff in companies don’t get the rewards that they should be getting when they give their all. To improve workplace productivity but to also keep your staff happy, reward hard work. Provide bonuses where you can, but it doesn’t need to be a financial reward. You could treat a department to lunch or give managers a budget to spend on their staff each month, whether it’s treating them to doughnuts on a Friday or taking them out for a quick drink after work one night. The more you can give back to your staff, the better and if they notice they’re getting rewarded for their efforts, they’ll work even harder for those rewards. You can reward staff with employee benefits too by improving what they receive as part of their package.

Remember their workload

Workloads are going to vary for different staff members because not everyone can take on as much as you can or maybe their manager can. You need to be aware of what you are giving people and how much you’re asking of them. If a department only has a small number of people, then overloading them with work is only going to cause an added amount of stress and pressure. This can be resolved in a number of ways. Firstly, you could consider outsourcing some tasks that are taking up precious time or think about perhaps looking into how to delegate workloads a bit more fairly through task management software and other platforms that can help share the workload.

Give them flexible working

There are plenty of organizations now that are giving the opportunity for staff to work from home and to remote work when they need to take time off. This can be hugely beneficial for those staff members who have other priorities like looking after family and house emergencies that might not necessarily but something they can avoid. As the perfect organization, you’re not losing out as long as you’re providing the staff member with the tools they need in order to work from home. Being able to give your staff the opportunity to have more a work-life balance will also be greatly appreciated. So look at who you could reward this to first and then you could perhaps roll it out to other staff members later on and once it’s been established with certain employees.

Make work processes more successful

Work processes from the IT support to the layout of the office all contribute to the happiness of staff and ensuring they can work to the best of their ability. When something breaks down or fails, and your IT support isn’t able to fix it quickly, this is an example of a work process being less than successful. It can be frustrating as an employee when you’re expected to reach targets and objectives, but the work processes within the workplace aren’t aiding this.

Providing a perfect organization is very difficult, but you can certainly improve what you’re providing now for your staff. Look at opportunities for career progression, treat your staff when they work hard and manage the workplace so that it works and runs effectively for your employees to get the most out of their working day.