Don’t assume your top-performing employees are going to stay with you forever… It takes PROACTIVE measures to retain good employees.
Did you know:
- It costs 150 percent of a sales person’s annual salary to replace them
- It takes 5-6 months for most new hires to reach full productivity
- Turnover negatively affects productivity, service continuity, and team dynamics
But here is the GOOD news: There are key drivers you can leverage to drive employee retention. If you want to keep your high-value employees from leaving, it is critical that you employ these five tips before it’s too late.
Dissatisfied and disengaged workers can kill your business. To fix this, we must look beyond the basics of compensation and benefits. To make a lasting impact on employee engagement and turnover we must strive to positively impact the REAL DRIVERS of employee retention and job satisfaction including:
- Communication
- Performance clarity and feedback
- Organizational culture, rewards and recognition
- Relationships with managers and peers
- Career development opportunities
- Knowledge of the organization’s goals and vision
Employ the following steps to increase employee engagement and retention:
1. Give employees a vision and a voice
- Provide employees with a purpose-driven mission, vision and goals.
- Communicate with employees regularly regarding how their role/department fits into the larger picture to achieve corporate goals.
- Build clarity, transparency and alignment in the organization.
- Give them a voice – Involve employees in making suggestions to improve workplace culture and /or business processes and planning. The people closest to the work often have the best ideas regarding ways to make improvements.
- Soliciting employee input has two clear benefits:
- 1.) Increased employee engagement due to “feeling heard”, and
- 2.) Workplace and processes improvements resulting from implementing their suggestions
2. Provide regular feedback, recognition and appreciation
“Compensation is a right, recognition is a gift.” (Rosabeth Moss Kanter)
- Sales managers should spend at least 25 percent of their time coaching their direct reports – with two to four hours spent in one-on-one meetings with each rep every week.
- Thank employees spontaneously, by name, for their contributions.
- Be specific in your feedback and recognition; Identify the value that the employee brings to the team and the organization as a whole.
- Celebrate success and provide positive feedback on a regular basis for a job well done.
3. Provide small perks at work
Brainstorm and implement small perks that make employees feel appreciated:
- “Bagel mornings” or a team luncheon
- Gift cards
- Flextime or working remotely when needed
- Discount memberships
- “Casual Fridays”
- Break room games
4. Develop a succession plan
According to a recent Hay Group study, 47 percent of workers are unsure they can achieve their career objectives at their present company. How can you address this?
- Foster employee development to help employees understand their path for growth if they choose to stay at the company.
- Determine ways to assist in their career development while filling key roles within the company.
- Provide opportunities for new training, new challenges and increased responsibility, such as taking on a special project or a team leadership role.
- Take the time to understand your employees’ interests and career aspirations, then work closely with them to develop a plan accordingly. (As noted by the American Society of Training & Development, increased investment in training also yields higher gross margins and income per employee.)
5. Provide meaningful work – This is imperative.
One of the most important ways to keep employees engaged is to give them meaningful work!
For a sales rep, the meaningful work is the SELLING.
Meaningful, VALUE-ADDED work has been proven to increases motivation, performance, and productivity. Find ways to increase the amount of time your people spend doing value-added work:
- Give them the tools they need to succeed.
- If you sell and market to corporate training and HR, invest in a high-quality list of decision-maker contacts to reach out to – so your reps can stop wasting time digging for leads. Professional sales reps should be selling, not hunting and pecking for leads.
- Develop and execute targeted email campaigns to generate more qualified leads.
- Identify and eliminate tasks which should be moved to a sales support admin person.
- Provide sales reps with the tools they need to perform meaningful work.
- Free up their time so they can concentrate on doing value-added work, like talking with customers.
By providing your sales reps with meaningful, value-added work, you can achieve the following:
-
- Increase each rep’s selling time per month
- Increase sales and gross profit margins
- Decrease absenteeism and attrition
- Improve employee engagement
- REDUCE costly employee turnover
To help your sales reps focus on the work that matters (to them and to you), it is imperative that you provide them with a high-quality database of people to market and sell to. If you’re in Corporate Training and HR, you’re in luck – Mentor Tech Group has hand-built a database of decision-maker contacts in Corporate Training and HR! We have the contacts you’ve been searching for – with email addresses and phone numbers! For more information, contact Mentor Tech Group today.
You will be amazed at the quality and accuracy of the Mentor Tech Group data.
How clients describe Mentor Tech Group’s market intelligence data:
- Well worth the investment
- Perfectly targeted list
- Exceeded expectations
- Valuable time saver
- Reliable
- Highly accurate
Mentor Tech Group’s data consists of decision-maker “market intelligence” for more than 40,000 contacts at 5500+ North American companies. And each piece of data in our database was entered as a result of a personal conversation with one of our Market Intelligence Consultants. This is highly unique and adds tremendous value to our data by allowing us to learn a contact’s area of responsibility, not just their title. We call these Job Codes and they allow us to segment the list by job responsibility (no longer by a nebulous title!).
We’re here to help you achieve the success you want, with the database of Corporate Training & HR decision-makers you NEED. To learn more, please call us today at (651) 457-8600, Ext. 1.
Wishing you much success…until next time.
