Tag: employee experience

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Employee Retention Strategies in a Tight Labor Market

Summary:

  • Effective employee retention strategies are crucial in today’s labor market, where there are more available jobs than job seekers.
  • Flexibility is a primary factor in retaining current employees, but it can mean different things for employees, depending on the industry and roles
  • Technology plays a vital role in gathering data and feedback that can help measure employee satisfaction and spot potential issues that trigger employees to quit.

The COVID-19 pandemic. The Great Resignation. Quiet Quitting.  

All of this has created a much tighter job market with low labor participation. Currently, there are around 10 million vacancies for just 5.7 million unemployed workers. The labor participation rate is at 62.6%, down from 63.3% in February 2020. This is the equivalent of 1.8 million fewer workers.     

All of this has made it trickier as well as vital for HR professionals to keep positive employee retention rates and hold on to their top talent, particularly since remote work has become more commonplace and sought after. Employees now have a much larger job market to find new opportunities, which, in turn, means tighter competition for talent. 

Webinar: How to Retain Hourly Employees

With more jobs and a smaller talent pool, how do you retain top talent and increase your chances of attracting new employees? There are several ways to boost employee retention, but what’s challenging is implementing a strategy that makes the most sense for your organization and people. We spoke with Jack Light, a labor economics Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, to provide us with more insight.

Understand why good employees quit and why they stay

It’s impossible to identify the best employee retention strategies for your specific circumstance without finding out what causes attrition. According to the Work Institute’s 2022 Retention Report, over 47 million employees voluntarily quit their job in 2021. This is the highest turnover rate since 2001 — when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began measuring this metric

According to the report, some of the most common reasons why people quit their jobs include:

  • A lack of career development opportunities
  • Stress due to a lack of resources or training
  • Prioritizing health and/or family – caring for dependents, personal health reasons, or health-related issues due to work
  • Searching for different opportunities that will give them a better work-life balance
  • Issues with their current work environment

These areas are well within leadership’s control, and they can quickly improve these conditions by implementing changes and using the right tools.  

It’s always easy to assume that compensation is the main motivation for employees to stay at a company. However, that’s not always the case. What’s valuable to your team is not always as apparent as you think. Beyond a competitive salary and benefits package, there are other areas that can be equally valuable to employees.

  • Fulfillment or finding purpose in a role
  • Job satisfaction
  • Workplace culture
  • Relationships with bosses and colleagues and teamwork
  • Company values
  • Processes such as onboarding
  • Flexibility

Once you understand what your employees value most, you’ll be more equipped to make changes and create programs that compel them to stay. 

Watch: How to Predict an Employee Flight Risk

Establish a feedback system

There are two sides to feedback that are crucial to employee retention. The first is feedback from employers about job performance. The second is feedback from employees regarding operations, policies, and colleagues. Both are key to creating a culture of employee appreciation.

And both are important and should be gathered and addressed promptly.

Employees value feedback that’s immediate and clear. It helps them improve their work, makes them feel appreciated, and shows how valuable their contribution is to the organization. 

Meanwhile, encouraging employees to provide feedback about the company and their tasks helps with retention, too. When employees are comfortable enough to share their thoughts on what works and what needs improvement, you’ll have a goldmine of insights on how to keep your best talent.

“The goal of gathering employee feedback is to try and surface low-hanging fruits that you can be actioning on that you may not otherwise be aware of,” says Light. “So it might actually turn out that a lot of your employees are struggling to get to work, for example, because there’s a bus route that’s been canceled. Or maybe you have a particular manager who many people are struggling to work with. Those are the sorts of things that are valuable from the perspective of an employee but can be quite difficult to find out.” 

That’s why having a healthy company culture that embraces feedback is crucial. And it shouldn’t stop at gathering employee sentiments. Another equally important part of the equation is the mechanism to act on them.

“If you don’t do anything with that data and that feedback, you’re probably going to get less and less of it as time goes on,” says Beau Grzanich, head of solutions at Workforce.com. Transparency is key here. You need to inform your employees about the actions you’ve taken based on feedback they’ve provided. Doing so will incentivize people to provide more information that can drive more results and benefits in terms of employee retention. 

The frequency of feedback is also important. Typically, companies do it regularly — quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. While this provides some structure, feedback tends to be more effective when it’s fluid and immediate. Moreover, it doesn’t always have to be in a formal setting. It can be casual, during quick catch-ups, or through automated tools like Workforce.com’s Shift Feedback and Rating feature. 

Engage your managers, and they’ll engage their teams

People leave managers, not companies. This popular phrase regarding employee engagement and retention is supported by data from Gallup that shows that “it takes more than a 20% pay raise to lure most employees away from a manager who engages them”. And it takes almost nothing to poach disengaged employees.

Empower your managers to engage their teams effectively. One way to do this is to take administrative and repetitive tasks off their plate. This makes it easier for them to focus on the people-centric aspects of their work.

Implementing the right technology can help managers work smarter and spend less time on tasks like scheduling, time tracking, labor forecasting, and payroll. As a result, they focus more on coaching their employees and understanding and addressing potential issues.

Offer flexibility

Employees tend to stay with a company that offers flexibility. Research has shown that flexibility at work is becoming increasingly important for job seekers, particularly among younger employees. But before you think about implementing policies around it, you first need to understand what flexibility actually means for your employees. 

Typically, people view flexibility as being able to control their work arrangements. This means having the option to work outside of the typical office setting and set hours, enjoying a flexible schedule, or being able to attend to important matters that typically warrant PTO or waiting until the weekend.

“An important thing to remember is that flexibility is often quite loosely defined. It’s much harder if you’ve got regular opening hours or you’re a retail store, and there are fixed tasks that need to be done and planned in advance,” explains Light. If that’s the case, how do you create a certain level of flexibility for hourly workers? 

Light says that offering a certain level of predictability is important for hourly workers. This means providing their schedules ahead of time, so they can plan their activities outside of work accordingly. In fact, data shows that employees who get their schedules a couple of days before their shift are more likely to quit compared to staff who receive their schedule at least 10 days in advance.

Create programs and perks that are valuable to your employees

Competitive benefits, incentives, and perks can compel employees to stay with you. But again, the key here is to know what types of benefits they find valuable. Game rooms, free meals, and company-sponsored gym memberships are all nice to have, but those perks are not always good enough reasons to keep employees from looking elsewhere. 

Get to know your employees to understand what matters to them. Consider that you have employees who are probably in different life stages. Looking at your workforce’s demographics is a good first step in determining what programs you can devise that will make the most impact. 

Your employees’ age group, seniority level, gender, as well as their personal circumstances will all dictate what they deem important. Some perks and incentives to consider:

  • Professional development. Opportunities for employees to learn new skills, such as training programs or attendance at industry-specific conferences
  • Health and wellness stipends or reimbursement. To cover costs of things like sports activities, healthcare, and mental health programs
  • Company culture. Activities, such as team-building games, that help establish a stronger company culture

Whether it’s additional time-off benefits, family activities, upskilling, professional development opportunities, or employee recognition programs, make sure that your benefits package includes items that make the most sense for your operations and where your employees are — both in tenure and life in general.  

While it’s not easy to figure this out, you can always drill down on data and employee feedback to determine the specific types of programs you should implement within the organization.

Enrich your onboarding process

Convincing and attracting new hires is just half the battle. The other half is making sure they stay. Employee onboarding sets the tone for a new hire, and you need to make it count to retain them. According to Gallup, 70% of employees who had a positive onboarding experience say that they have “the best possible job.” 

Employee onboarding is a crucial process where companies must deliver on what’s promised during the hiring process and integrate new hires into their role and the organization. Successful onboarding is not attained overnight. It is a process that can last through a new hire’s first year with the company. 

Here are some of the ways human resources teams can make employee onboarding successful:

  • Create a clear and intuitive onboarding roadmap. Define where you want your new hires to be at specific time frames, whether monthly or quarterly or what makes sense for your organization. Gather feedback about the process and iterate your roadmap and programs as you go along.
  • Incorporate onboarding programs that will help employees build initial rapport and cultivate healthy working relationships with other team members. It’s vital for new hires to feel included and part of a group.
  • Equip new hires with mentorship and training. New employees become more productive faster when they have the tools to learn and carry out their responsibilities.
  • Provide clarity when it comes to expectations and goals. Employees, especially new hires, become more efficient when they clearly understand their roles, career paths, and how they directly contribute to the organization’s overall success.
  • Use technology to organize onboarding files, keep track of employee details, and streamline new hire paperwork. This frees up time for more critical parts of onboarding. Besides, no new hire would want to deal with a pile of documents to sign and information overload on their first day of work. 

A well-structured onboarding process not only gives new employees a good first impression of the company but also plays a big part in reducing employee turnover. 

Maximize the offboarding process to benchmark market trends

On the other end of the employee life cycle, you must also pay attention to your offboarding process. While it is the stage where an employee transitions out of the company, it can still help with your employee retention strategy. 

You should ensure that any employee leaving the company has a smooth exit. So maximize exit interviews and use them to gather feedback on what you can improve and what departing employees think will make current staff stay. Use this opportunity to understand their motivation for leaving. Is it career advancement, a more competitive salary, or burnout?

You can also use the exit interview to gain insight into their new job and what other companies are doing to attract and retain employees. Inquire about what compelled them to move. Is it a generous sign-on bonus, more comprehensive learning and development, or the promise of a healthy work-life balance? 

“Exit interviews, in particular, are beneficial for benchmarking where people are going and what the wages and working conditions are gonna be like in the firms that they’re moving to,” says Light. 

With this information, you can create benchmarks on how the market is, compare it to where you stand, and strengthen your programs and processes accordingly.

Harness technology to boost employee retention

Data and feedback are crucial in strengthening your programs for retaining your employees.

“Something that’s particularly interesting at the moment is that the data is getting increasingly available in real time” remarks Light.

For instance, when an employee is coming in late more often, the right tool can help you identify this and address it before it becomes a real issue.

“Moving from the sort of survey done at fixed points in time to more proactively identifying when you need to be stepping in and checking in if everything is okay is super exciting,” says Light.

Furthermore, technology significantly contributes to the employee experience. It helps organizations streamline administrative processes so that managers can focus more on being on the ground with their teams and coaching their staff. It also helps employees perform their tasks better and more efficiently, allowing more opportunities for innovation or additional time for training and development.

Streamline workflows and improve the employee experience with Workforce.com

Workforce.com provides efficiencies around demand-based employee scheduling, time and attendance, and labor forecasting. It helps improve the employee experience by providing staff with a straightforward way of clocking in, accessing their schedules, and filing leave requests. It has real-time insights, shift rating and feedback, and an in-depth reporting functionality that can provide managers with actionable insights on key metrics. 

Book a call today if you want to know how Workforce.com can improve your workforce management and employee retention. 

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Practical tips for better employee experience going into 2022

Summary

  • “Antiwork” culture is fueling the labor shortage.

  • To attract workers again, employee experience needs to be improved.

  • Addressing the fundamentals of workforce management can make employees happier, engaged, and productive. 

Most people at some point have felt the urge to pull a Christopher McCandless. The notion of dropping everything and running away to the Alaskan wilderness in an old van is a refreshingly romantic one, especially for the unfulfilled employee. Who needs overbearing managers, rude customers, and exhausting overtime hours anyways, right?

“Antiwork” and the American labor shortage

Rejecting the status quo in favor of pursuing unconventional lifestyles and career paths is back in vogue now, thanks to an existential crisis sweeping the workforce. Spurred by the pandemic, disillusioned people everywhere are questioning what it means to be happy in their work.

These sentiments are in large part felt by young people part of the “antiwork” movement. They are tired of the structure behind traditional work-life – all the clock-ins, deadlines, barely livable wages, and whatnot. 

As a result, America is facing an unprecedented shortage in labor. According to a Peterson Institute for International Economics report, the country still needs 6.2 million jobs filled. Even still, many are choosing to opt out of the workforce. 

Perhaps it is time employers take a look inward for a moment to reevaluate how employees feel about their jobs. A report from Gallup measuring factors like employee stress, anger, sadness, and worry says that overall employee engagement is down 2% globally, with only 23% of people saying they are very happy working for their employer. In America and Canada, only 34% of employees said they felt engaged in their work. 

So, workers are angry and worried in the workplace; that isn’t great. And it certainly isn’t helping the labor shortage. Heading into 2022, businesses should seek to reevaluate their understanding of employee experience and strive to improve it. 

Of course, this is not all about the worker; poor employee experience translates to both time and monetary costs for businesses. Frustrated and disengaged employees usually take longer to complete tasks, and their work is often below standard. This can all lead to higher employee turnover, which is very costly to businesses. Sometimes, replacing a worker can cost nearly 20% of what they make annually. 

Improving employee experience

There are many informative lists out there regarding how to improve employee experience, with most suggesting things like team bonding events and haphazard appreciation gestures. While useful at times, these tend to be very vague attempts at solving the issue. Instead, it is worth tackling employee experience from a workforce management perspective. Many issues in employee experience stem from improper scheduling and attendance practices. Solving these problems will not only improve how employees feel about their jobs, but will also help businesses retain employees, attract new hires, and control labor costs. 

So, here’s what you can do:

Raise wages

This may seem obvious and overly simplistic. However, it is often because of this simplicity that managers overlook raising wages.

In these times, workers want to be recognized as human beings, and as such, be compensated accordingly. They want living wages more than they want 90-day bonuses. Some businesses already recognize this, choosing to adopt “pro-employee” mentalities and accept short-term increases in labor costs.

“There are a number of ways you can attract folks,” says Andy Cole of Elite Staffing during a Nov. 8 Workforce.com webinar. “But what we feel right now is that wages are by far the number one reason as to how you get people in the door.” As COO of a staffing agency covering 2,000 locations, Cole understands well what workers value most right now and going forward into 2022. 

Offer opportunities for shift feedback

Employees like to be heard, especially when it comes to how they feel about their shifts. Providing them with a tool to automatically rate shifts every time they clock out will give managers valuable insight into how satisfied employees are with their hours, coworkers, and environment.  

It is important to receive feedback on a regular basis. Doing this helps managers identify and resolve underlying issues employees may have early on before things get out of hand. 

Utilize shift swapping functionality

Sometimes, life happens. And when life decides to happen, rigid schedules can become a nightmare. Offering flexible technology that lets employees easily find shift coverage can go a long way in improving employee experience. 

“I think [my employees] being able to select the position or the shift for that day is really helpful because they feel like they’re helping the team,” says Katie Strehlow, an HR generalist for a baseball team in California. “They come in with a positive attitude, which always leads to a better work performance.” Her employees use shift swapping technology on their phones; she says it has led to an increase in engagement, satisfaction, and performance. 

Clean up your leave management

Recently it was discovered that Amazon has been incorrectly handling paid and unpaid leave for employees due to flaws in their time and attendance software. Many of these employees were wrongfully fired after the software marked them as “no shows” while on leave. If Jeff Bezos’ empire gets leave management wrong, so can any business. 

Employees must have proper visibility into their paid and unpaid leave. They also need to know that it will never be mishandled or miscalculated. Leave management systems that cater to employee experience should be accurate, transparent, and easy to use; ensuring these things helps employers build trust with their workers. Leave management should also integrate with scheduling systems, so as to easily avoid accidentally scheduling people when they are away. 

Enhance scheduling visibility

With fair workweek laws popping up across the country, it is becoming apparent that employees highly value predictive scheduling practices. Employers should make sure they send out schedules far in advance so as not to surprise their workers. 

In addition, schedules should be published onto a single live platform for all employees to view anytime, anywhere – this eliminates the confusion and frustration that comes from repeatedly sending out different schedules across an entire workforce. 

Personalize with granular employee data

It is helpful to have an in-depth workforce management system that provides data down to the individual. Understanding employee preferences through metrics like where and when they consistently show up late, or for what shifts they usually request a swap, helps managers address underlying experience issues. 

Granular employee data also helps managers equitably distribute shifts. For instance, managers can actively see while scheduling which employees have been given the fewest hours, and then react accordingly. Segmenting data in a personalized way like this also provides insight into sales vs labor hour metrics; managers can use this information to recognize and help out employees who might be struggling with productivity. 

Automate time tracking

According to a recent article from Forbes, outdated legacy systems are often unable to efficiently automate time tracking; the inconvenience of this harms employee experience and increases administrative costs. 

Hourly employees want their lives to be easy, especially when it comes to monotonous tasks like clocking in and out and filling in timesheets. They also want peace of mind regarding the timeliness and accuracy of their paychecks. Automating time and attendance guarantees employees are paid correctly every time, eliminating the headaches of variables like overtime and pay differentials. An automated system like this also serves to make your employees’ jobs easier, improving their overall experience. 

Slick and easy UX

If employees are unable to navigate basic tools for their jobs, their experience is undoubtedly going to get really sour, really fast. Complicated and broken UX can cause anger and stress for employees and its something businesses should seek to eliminate. 

UX experts note easy logins, straightforward interfaces, consistent styles, and easy to find policies/contact info as several principles that should be considered when designing systems to maximize employee experience.

It comes down to the basics

To improve employee experience, you first need to solve workforce management. Scheduling and timekeeping are the fundamentals of how a business, and its staff, operate on a day-to-day basis. Streamlining these areas always results in higher employee motivation, engagement, and happiness. 

Want to get started? Hop on a call with us today. We’ll talk you through it.

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What is workforce management? Different departments have different ideas

time clock, workforce management, scheduling, time and attendance

The term “workforce management” may be a common term around the office, but that doesn’t mean it’s well understood.

A major challenge is that IT, HR, Finance and Business Operations —  the departments that each have control over some aspect of workforce management —  think about it differently. There is not a consistent definition among professionals in these groups, said Lisa Disselkamp, a managing director in Deloitte Consulting’s Human Capital Practice.

While workforce management used to be a more simple term — mostly encompassing payroll, timesheets and scheduling — now it encompasses a broader array of duties including recruiting, onboarding, training, technology and more, she said. Some of these duties are owned by HR, while others are owned by IT, finance or operations.

Now, workforce management is a business function with many stakeholders, and this can cause confusion or disorder among these departments, Disselkamp said. 

Meanwhile, workforce management has also shifted from purely transactional to strategic, she said. When she talked to clients 5 to 10 years ago, conversations revolved around issues like, ‘‘I have to fix my timekeeping because payroll is not right or there are errors.”

workforce management, scheduling, time and attendance

“You were trying to fix broken processes,” she said. “Today the difference is the outcome. The outcome is ‘I’m spending too much on labor and workforce management. I need processes and I need to hold people accountable to the results the business is interested in.’ The transaction is just how I get the result,” she said. Essentially, workforce management now hinges on owning specific business outcomes versus owning processes.

Conflicts of ownership

Disselkamp explained how different departments may look at workforce management: HR looks at it from hire-to-retire and the HR functions in between like onboarding, training and scheduling. IT thinks about the platforms used to enable workforce management and think about questions like “Am I delivering good technology? Is the system performing properly? Am I assigning people access to the system?”  Finance deals with costs and funding. And business operations thinks about the day-to-day tasks and how to allocate work. 

Also read: Workforce management takes time and effort 

Different departments can share a set of metrics to show how they’re performing rather than relying on different numbers, Disselkamp said. Shared metrics helps unify departments under the same workforce management goal.

For example, grocery stores are famous for bad schedules, she said. From the workforce management perspective, some grocery stores just don’t honor that social contract with employees who need predictability and good schedules to plan their life around.

Management can ask themselves the question, “Can I translate good schedules into financial outcomes?” Disselkamp said. And the answer is yes. This provides the HR and finance departments to work together toward a common goal, combining scheduling and finances. They can connect data like schedule scores versus turnover, which has the potential to make the case for better schedules because turnover costs a company a good amount of money. 

Juggling 4 types of employees

Not only does workforce management mean different things to departments, but it also means different things for hourly/shift workers, salaried workers and contingent workers, Disselkamp said. Front line managers may struggle when they manage all three types. Their definition of workforce management might be how they, on a day-to-day basis, allocate the work that must be accomplished and by which type of worker. Does the company have the right systems in place to manage all three employee subsets? How do you allocate shifts and adjust workloads for types of workers for whom you have different legal obligations?

Further, the rise of nonhuman labor through automation, artificial intelligence and robots complicates workforce management more, Disselkamp said. Sometimes bots need system access just like human users do,  and so they need their own individual “identity” to enter a system and do certain work. In situations like this, Disselkamp said, a front line manager essentially must manage four types of workers — robots included. 

“I think it’s a fascinating issue, and we don’t have the leading practices yet,” Disselkamp said. 

Potential solutions for modern workforce management 

While labor has traditionally be thought about from a supply-and-demand perspective, now the interesting thing about workforce management is the trend of looking at it more from the perspective of the employee experience, Disselkamp said. Employees need to work a certain number of hours a week and know their schedule ahead of time so that they can plan the rest of their life around it. 

A principal called “schedule equilibrium” — an employee-focused way to score workforce management from an employee’s perspective —  can help with that, Disselkamp said. There are three main ideas behind schedule equilibrium: predictability, stability and adequacy of hours.

In workforce management today, companies need to honor the social contract with employees and contractors and create good schedules, she said. 

“A schedule is like a purchase order for your labor, and timesheet is like an invoice. So if we think about workers like we do suppliers, we want to develop good relationships with them. And that means we have a business relationship with them where we are providing work and income and workers are providing us with their labor and availability. People want to be empowered to say when I work, how much I work [and] what I earn,” she said.

Another leading practice in workforce management is developing a workforce management office, or WMO, she said. A WMO is a department that sits high enough in the organization to have executive-level availability, and they’re in charge of tasks like what the organization’s best practices for workforce management are, what enabling technology there needs to be and which staff members will take on specific duties or responsibilities. Further, the WMO department is held accountable to certain metrics and performance outcomes, like any other department. 

“Staff it with people who specialize in workforce management. That’s their job. It’s not part of their job,, it’s not something they do as part of a committee — it is their full-time day job,” she said. 

Further, this could help organizations whose operations, IT, HR and Finance departments are not on the same page about workforce management. 

“[It’s] being managed by all kinds of people and we don’t know what good looks like. We don’t have standards, and it’s hard to come together and agree on what should happen first and where we should spend money to improve workforce management,” Disselkamp said. 

Also, a trend that has emerged in the past five to 10 years is the position of Director of Workforce Management, she said. 

Daniel Smitley, director of workforce management and analytics at World Travel Holdings, has worked with the organization for five years but became its first director of workforce management only three years ago. Prior to that, the highest person in the organization with “workforce management” in their title was a manager. 

Smitley’s team is responsible for scheduling call center agents and forecasting calls, he said. They also manage agents’ time off and any reporting associated with that, and their team is directly invested in the finances behind the schedules. 

Similar to Disselkamp’s “schedule equilibrium” solution, employee experience is a consideration for World Travel Holdings’ workforce management team when it creates schedules, Smitley said. The call center environment can be rigid, and he wants it to be more relaxed for these employees. Depending on the season, there are about 700 call center employees, most of whom are hourly, he added. 

“Work-life balance is my passion, and as the director of workforce management, I make sure that’s a key lens that my team looks through,” he said.  “We’ve always cared about our agent experience, and we’ve continued to progress toward giving them more autonomy and empowerment to create their own schedules.”