Retaining Top Talent

Priya’s accountancy firm had been running for 4 years, she had painstaking built her business from scratch; knew each client personally and had recruited and developed her team so that she as certain that her clients were receiving an excellent service.

Then Richard one of her longest servicing employees resigned.

She was distraught, “I’ve poured so much into developing him, why would he leave?” she asked. “He seemed happy, what if this is the start of a exodus?”

Ever felt like this?

Losing a valued employee can be a business owners worst nightmare. It’s takes a lot of time, effort and resource to recruit and onboard new team members.

Priya and I met with Richard to get some feedback on his decision to leave to business, turned out that he found a new job, closer to home, that would enable him to spend more time with his young family.

While he wasn’t about to change his mind about his resignation, he did give us some valuable insight in to the team and we used them to communicate effectively with staff and build team morale.

Worried about losing a valued team member? Here are a few tips to help you:

1. Build and maintain great relationships with your team; have a open and respectful relationship with your team, spend time together and show genuine interest in the things that they are interested in.

2. Communicate your team mission and aspirations; ensure that everyone in your team knows how they fit into the aspirations for the business and what their path to growth is.

3. Ask for feedback; it is important that your team feels heard and they their ideas are taken into consideration as you grow and scale your business.

4. Measure morale regularly; team meetings and employee satisfaction surveys are a good way of checking in.

5. Understand what motivates each individual; everyone is different and that may mean communicating and creative incentives differently to suit individual personalities .

Need help recruiting and retaining your team, DM us and we’ll be in touch to schedule a quick call to see how we can help you

Managers, the new poor relation?

Gil’s business has been going for 6 years. It’s grown steadily year on year, and Gil built a really great team to support him and bring in the additional skills that he needed to professionalise his operations.

In the last year his team grew from a nimble 30 to over 100 staff. Far from being that answer to their fulfilment issues, product quality and customer service quality declined, while staff turnover increased.

At first the decline in quality was put down to poor hires, but when the problems continued, and a couple of grievances were received from staff, it became apparent that there was a deeper issue.

The rapid growth of the business meant that high performing staff were promoted to management positions, and given responsibilities for recruitment, staff development, budgets and production, with little or no management training or previous experience.

It was assumed that those promoted would be excellent managers, but no actual training or support was given. This led to inconsistencies in way staff were managed, which led to division and resentment within teams, and certain behaviours going unchecked. For example: when Donna asked her manager to work from home 2 days a week, it was approved informally. However when Amira asked her manager for the same, it was refused with the reason that it was bad for team morale. Likewise sickness hasn’t been treated the same, with managers interpreting the policy differently.

The newly promoted managers were also struggling to get their day job done and deal with staff, so were getting burnt out and still failing to reach their numbers.

We often find that great staff are promoted because they are amazing at one thing, but as business owners we know that a management role comes with lots of plates to keep spinning.

We helped Gil’s team support their managers with a bespoke Management Development Programme to ensure that any skills gaps were addressed, all managers had a clear understanding of their responsibilities and were provided coaching and mentoring support.

Are your Managers the poor relations?

January is a great time to review the skills of you and your managers. If you need some help, get in touch to discuss how we can help you.

Are your Job Descriptions up to date?

I have to be honest, I’ve personally never had a job description (JD) that was up to date for more than three months at a time, but that’s because I’ve always recognised that to progress my career I needed to do more than my JD.

That being said, it is always good to keep track of how roles are changing and developing within your business.

This week I met with client of mine to discuss an upcoming restructure that has come about because of business growth. We had already established the new structure and additional roles that would be needed.

So we looked at what needed to be removed from his role to ensure that he was able to focus on the important elements, which would ensure the business continued to thrive, and then reviewed the existing JD’s for his team, so we could add some additional responsibilities.

What was interesting was that some of the tasks that the CEO was doing were already in his teams JD and that there was even one individual who did not have a job description at all! Needless to say that has been rectified and we have formulated a plan of action, for consultation and implementation.

It is really hard effectively recruit, set objectives and monitor success without having an up to date job description as a foundation document. Also when dealing with under-performing staff it is important that their job descriptions are correct, as you could be disciplining then for under-performing a task that they morphed into with no training or support.

A JD doesn’t need to be pages and pages, or a To Do list! Just ensure it covers the following:

• Job Title
• Who the role reports to, and other key stakeholders
• Where the role sits within the team, department and business
• Key areas of responsibility and the deliverable's expected
• Required education and training
• Soft skills and behaviours necessary to excel
• Location and travel requirements

And Remember NOT to include:

• Internal terminology, jargon or acronyms
• Anything that could be considered discriminatory
• Writing a Wish List

As a business owner you wear many hats, it’s important for your personal growth, as well as that of your business to ensure that you have an effective and efficient team, where responsibilities and objectives are clear and transparently communicated. Having up to date job descriptions is a big part of that.