5 Questions for Mangers Regarding Employee Retention & Engagement

As a manger or business owner, are you managing  employee engagement and retention in a post pandemic world? People have re-evaluated their jobs, priorities, and lives. Employees are moving and taking their skills with them! As a manager you can improve employee engagement and retention, and we can help you.

Below are 5 questions that may help you to improve your own approach towards keeping your key employees and engaging those that may seem to be coasting through at minimum requirement.

  1. What is my mindset?

This is a great question to ask yourself, first and foremost. How do you approach engaging and developing staff? Are you clearly voicing your expectations, or are you assuming that everyone knows? Are you open to having regular structured conversations with employees about expectations and about how you can facilitate development and training to meet those expectations? Do you hold people accountable? Do you recognise discretionary effort and work well done? Do you know your employees? Are you aware of what motivates them or if there may be personal or professional blocks for them?

Understanding your role and mindset around your employee’s engagement and retention is a starting point. Gaining clarity around your responsibility helps you to manage situations before they become a problem.

  1. Who do I need to focus on?

When it comes to the workforce you may need to focus on those that are strong talent, but who may be a flight risk because they may not be fulfilled in their role. Also, you will need to focus on those that are not fully engaged or happy and are coasting at minimum output.

But how do you know who is who? It may be easy to identify those that are coasting, but how do you recognise the flight risk before they fly? This can be difficult, because unless you are asking the right questions, you may never know…until it is too late, and your best employee is walking out the door to join another organisation! Having regular conversations, observation, asking questions, and enquiring as to how you can support their goals is a great starting point.

  1. What is most important to them?

Now that you know who it is that you need to focus on, you need to know what is important to them. What will motivate one person over another. Will money be the only factor? What about work/life balance? Is it the chance of promotion or how they are viewed within the organisation? You cannot assume that the same factor will motivate everyone, and yet you need to know what is important to each individual. This can be part of the performance review or a less formal conversation.

  1. What can I do to further engage & retain employees?

Do you as a manager need to be more aware of your employees so as to have a clearer understanding of what motivates? Do you need to facilitate more training? Or do you need to provide more social opportunities within the group? Do you need to take notice and recognise staff efforts? Do you need to hold people accountable for not meeting expectations? Do you need to provide more challenge and advancement opportunities?

This can be a difficult question if you have no idea what specifically motivates one individual over another. You cannot assume that one answer fits all employees!

  1. What can they do?

Once there is a clear understanding of what are the key motivating factors for the individual, and you know what you can do to facilitate that, there also needs to be a conversation about what the employee needs to do. Employee engagement is a two-way street, and while there is an onus on the employer to provide opportunity and training, it is important that the employee understands that they have a level of responsibility regarding engagement also. For instance, if they want increased pay, how are they prepared for the extra challenge and responsibility that comes with it? If they are not open to increased challenge at this time, then it must be clear that increased pay is not an option.

Having these conversations is much easier when you know what their motivating factors are, and how prepared they are to accept the responsibility attached. Avoiding these conversations can lead to losing highly skilled and motivated staff, along with allowing lower effort to be considered acceptable.

The Easier Way

An easier way to answer questions 2 through 5 is to use our Harrison Analytics system. At the touch of a button, we can show you what each individual employee’s motivating factors are and how fulfilled they are within those factors. We can also show you and the employee what specific things they will need to bring to the table to allow them to fulfil their performance goals.

At CMD Group, we can provide you with group and individual reports allowing you to have clear information on who to focus on, what is important to them, what you can do and also what they can do to achieve mutual fulfilment. Imagine being able to identify all of this individual information instantly, without constant questions and conversations that can go around in circles.

We can carry out an online questionnaire, deliver reports that focus on each individual’s motivating factors and measure exactly how fulfilled they are in their role. From there the conversations are simple and tailored to each individual. Simple, effective and efficient in time and cost.

Feel free to contact us for a no obligation conversation and/or demonstration about how we can help you in regard to an effective and efficient employee engagement and retention strategy for you.

Contact Us For More Information

 

 

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