Director for Strategic Development at BDO Unicon Outsourcing
The most common employer’s fear is that their competitors entice valuable employees. Now, these fears are even stronger as companies cannot substantially increase salaries because of the crisis.
But even if there are no material incentives to encourage employees to stay, you still can do something. You should divide the company’s employees into groups according to certain criteria (age, gender, marital status, education, etc.) and identify their needs. For example, our company has many young women with children. Their key need is to spend time with their family. Therefore, they can be attracted by flexible working hours.
You need to have proper, well-organised promotion of your efforts - to inform employees about all the good that you do for them. I know a case when an employee who has recently resigned, in a conversation with the head of the HR department, praised the benefits at his new job and regretted there were none in his previous position. And it turned out that the former employer also compensated for the costs of medicines, healthcare services and sports, the resigned employee simply was not aware of this. If he had been aware of this, he would have stayed. Furthermore, it is necessary to use friendly relations to tie employees to the team: to help them find friends in the team, to get them used to having lunch together, to going to the cinema and theatre etc. These little things lead to the fact that the team gradually becomes an indispensable part of a person’s life.
Employees need a fair management attitude. If yesterday you praised an employee, and today you forgot to say “Well done!” to the second one for a similar achievement, the latter may hold a grudge against you. And if it was the fault of several people, you have to blame either all of them or nobody. Otherwise, there will be those dissatisfied.
It is easy to quit work if all the employee’s duties consisted in writing a code. Whereas leaving a major project, developed by the bulk of the team, is different. You should tell employees what important things they are doing. Sometimes, the only way for an employee to gain new experience is to move to another organization for some period of time. Neither money nor a bicycle parking at the office will keep them. If you can’t prevent this, hold the initiative. Help him to seek for a new job and don’t forget to say that you will wait for him/her coming back.
