3 ways to win over employees

Employee retention is the buzz word in human resources and social media platforms today. There is a clear and direct bottom-line impact on revenue and profitability in service industries. Turnover impacts the culture of an organization, which drives client relationships and the ability to deliver services that meet expectations for all parties. Whether your company is designing and building beautiful landscapes, or you are maintaining established properties, culture drives everything you promise.

Some labor markets have unique challenges impacting employee retention. If your company struggles to find qualified staff, it’s hard to justify strategic investments in the people and culture that serve your clients when you don’t have the staff you need. Addressing talent acquisition while investing in employee retention seems expensive because it requires different strategies to address employee life cycle issues. However, the investments in your team create the culture magnet for talent and the talent acquisition problem solves itself. Here’s a few items to examine internally, and strategies you may want to consider:

1. Compensation and total rewards are hygiene factors. Today’s talent expects competitive compensation, reasonable working hours and other fringe benefits or they will not focus on staying and developing skills. If your employees are always looking over the fence in your labor market, then you have a hygiene problem. Additionally, today’s workforce values downtime and the ability to balance career with family.

If you push or offer consistent overtime in recruiting, hiring and managing your workforce, you may be driving a misaligned message to the employee’s individual values. For the purpose of benchmarking, you will find local compensation data by reaching out to your state workforce agency and requesting business assistance. Other hygiene factors include security, fairness and working conditions.

2. Work hard to understand your real costs. If you are making money but losing talent, you are putting business risk on the client relationship, and spending more time and effort hiring and training new employees. Your time is worth money to the business, so take a minute to understand the cost of turnover.

It may shock you to see how much is spent on the advertising, recruiting, hiring, onboarding and development process for your new employee. Additional costs are incurred when a manager trains the new employee, so include these items in your estimate.

3. Map out the “moments that matter” in an employee experience. Some examples include the first day on a new job, a promotion, ending or starting a new project, a performance appraisal, receiving feedback, a service anniversary and ending employment.

Employers with low turnover focus on the employee experience and leverage the employee’s energy in this moment to help them feel valued, appreciated and heard.

You can also use these moments to show your team members the next step in their professional development, which reinforces a strong culture of inclusivity.

As a young woman in the green industry, I lacked confidence in using my feminine and nurturing energy to benefit my team and my company. Over the last 20 years, I’ve come to realize the sense of belonging is critical in the workplace.

While stereotypical, don’t underrate the skills that round out the human experience and provide the critical component of retention: a sense of belonging.