404 | Improve Retention Rates – 5 Core Areas of Retention

The process to Improve retention rates is a top challenge for many companies. Your company may not have a retention problem. In either case, you want to be proactive to retention because the cost is so high. SHRM (Society of Human Resource Managers) reports that it can cost you one time or more to replace an employee and get them back up to the performance level of the incumbent. Today I share with you the five leverage points in to improve retention so that you can proactively strengthen your bottom line.

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Improve Retention Rates: The Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.

There’s five core areas of retention that you have to pay attention to. This has worked for my wife, Amanda Hammett. She’s the millennial translator. She works around the country working with companies around retention. We’ve merged a little bit of these things together because she works on, “How do you recruit and bring on the best talent?” The best talent is young ones. I know some of it scares the crap out of some of you, but if you avoid hiring young people, guess what? You will not have people to hire at some point in time. You either embrace it now and figure this out … There are five leverage points in there. If you mess up, you will not have a good employee experience.

Hi, my name’s Gene Hammett. What you just heard was a little bit of an excerpt from a speech I recently gave to multi-million-dollar business owners and founders. That was really about their overall business and leadership and really some of the high growth strategies that are necessary for you to grow your company.

I know that if you wanna grow your company, you’ve got to grow your people. When you invest enough to grow your people to make a difference, to move the needle, then you wanna make sure you retain that talent. I’m gonna go through some of the details that I didn’t share in that speech with you today about the five leverage points to employee retention so that you can improve your retention and you can actually create a stronger bottom line. So here we go; I’m gonna go cut over to my laptop.

This is just a quick little diagram of the five core areas for employee experience. If you wanna improve your retention rate, you’ve got to focus on the employee experience. When you are actually bringing someone in, you’re recruiting them. Those people have to go through a specific process. You’re setting the tone immediately for what the experience will be like when you get there. For example, if you interview someone and you never let them know that it wasn’t a good fit, then that’s gonna have a bad taste in their mouth. I’m gonna urge you to be the kind of company that communicates effectively, and even if someone’s not a good fit, figure out a way to tell them it’s not a good fit. Don’t leave them hanging on.

You may say that you didn’t want that person in the first place, but maybe you didn’t want them for that role or you didn’t want them right now. You don’t want to create any kind of damaging place inside there. That’s just one example. The whole recruitment process is a leverage point that if you get this right, everything else gets easier. It really is one of those cornerstones of the employee experience and we know that. One of the things we work with clients on is, what questions do you ask so that you are sure to bring on people that have similar values that you’d have? Not the same thoughts, and we want diversity of thought, but how do you bring them on to support the values of the culture that you’re trying to intentionally shape? The second core area here is the onboarding experience.

This is about the first three days or the first 60 days of that whole bringing the customer on, or bringing the client on, or bringing the employee on, excuse me. So you wanna have an onboarding process that’s very intentional. You may already have that, but some of the places where people miss the mark here, or … They just don’t have the right support to set expectations for what is necessary for them.

The leadership is not guiding them to really support them, let them figure out some things on their own. They go through a good job on the first day or two. We’ve all been through those kinds of meetings if you’ve ever worked for a company. But what happens over a 60-day period really matters a lot about what the employee experience will be there. We actually partner with Amanda on this, who is the millennial translator that I mentioned in the speech that you saw earlier.

That’s my wife. She can help understand the critical points of onboarding that really will make a difference in the employee experience. The third area here is lead, about leadership development, about how people want and need to be led, and how not to do it. The real big thing here is a lot of people are micro-managing or controlling and you don’t think you are. It’s not a black and white kind of thing.

There are scales of gray, if you will, in this. The better you are in tune with leading people, the more likely to have a better employee experience. The next area here is developing. This is about their own growth. It’s about what skills are they getting, what kind of responsibilities are they able to take ownership of, what projects and experiences are they getting that really adds to their own value to the marketplace.

I know it’s kinda scary to think about you increase the value of someone to the marketplace, but if you don’t invest in the development phase of your employees, then they will sit on your team and not be developed. They will not be at the fullest potential. So what you wanna do is have a very intentional program that allows you to develop people the way that they need to be developed. It’s not necessarily the way you want them developed, it’s the way they want to develop. If you wanna increase that employee experience and reduce your retention, then you want to, or increase your retention, forgive me, then you wanna make sure you have a development program that allows for the right leadership development. And then finally, the exit.

You may think, “What does that have to do? They’ve already left.” You wanna make sure that they’re leaving under the right pretenses and that you are aware of why they’re leaving. That will give you feedback into this. But also, there’s a lot of employees that come back like a boomerang.

They may leave because of this season in their life. Maybe they wanna travel, maybe they wanna go back to school, or maybe they wanna go learn something else, or some new opportunity. But there may be a reason why they want them to come back. You want them to actually be talking great about the company and experience that they had while you’re there because that will lead to more benefit. I’m gonna switch back to the camera real quick.

Hopefully, you have a little bit more intention to create a better employee experience, which will improve your retention.

I work with companies that want to be in a growth mode and they wanna hire the right people so that they can grow fast. It really takes a really good plan through all five of these stages if you want to increase the employee experience to a point where it’s a competitive advantage for you and your company. If you ever have any questions about this, make sure you reach out to me. I’ve got a lot of resources coming. We’ve got some new things going on. So make sure that you’re reaching out and just engage with me.

Just send me an email; [email protected]. Otherwise, just reach out through social media, wherever you see this information. As always, lead with courage, and we’ll see you next time.

Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.

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