With the world economy expanding, and with Brexit discouraging Europeans from seeking work in the UK, keeping the employees you have is coming increasingly into focus.
The Harvard Business Review* summarises some key findings about keeping employees:
- Over 50 % of people recruited in to an organization will leave within 2 years.
- One in four of new hires will leave within 6 months.
- Nearly 70% of organizations report that staff turnover has a negative financial impact due to the cost of recruiting, hiring, and training a replacement employee and the overtime work of current employees that’s required until the organization can fill the vacant position.
- Nearly 70 % of organizations report having difficulties in replacing staff.
Approximately 50% of organizations experience regular problems with employee retention.
So why are they leaving? Not usually for better pay, despite what managers may think. The same article gives the main reasons as:
- Employees feel the job or workplace is not what they expected.
- There is a mismatch between the job and person.
- There is too little coaching and feedback.
- There are too few growth and advancement opportunities.
- Employees feel devalued and unrecognized.
- Employees feel stress from overwork and have a work/life imbalance.
- There is a loss of trust and confidence in senior leaders.
We’ve highlighted the fifth bullet, because that’s the space we at Cocoon play in. A lot of our business comes from employers wanting to show employees that they are valued, their contribution is recognised, through a thoughtful and appropriate gift. Here are some examples:
- A Christmas gift for all employees: for under £10 you can incllude all employees in a small gift as a way of showing appreciation - and Good Tidings fits that bill perfectly
- An end of project thank you for the team - A Big Thank You is the perfect solution here
- A reassuring gift for employees of a company taken over - one of our customers recently faced this dilemma, and ordered 6,000 of The Sweetest Tins to show their newly taken over staff that they were important to them
Many of our clients have been doing this for many years, so they must feel that it works for them. So if retention is a problem, consider a gift. It needn’t cost much, in fact the tax man lets you give up to £50 per person with no tax implications for you or the employee.
Will it solve all your retention problems? No. Fix the problems with the job itself, with coaching, with advancement opportunities? No, no and no respectively. But it can make them feel “maybe this isn’t such a bad place to work after all”.