A happy, motivated team is the key to staff retention

Derek Buchanan, chief executive officer of Episys, explains the secrets to staff retention.

Every employer knows that finding the right staff and keeping them is the holy grail of management. With high recruitment and training costs, the risk remains that an employee may decide to leave because they do not feel valued. Research from the 2007 ‘Recruitment, retention and turnover’ survey from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) discovered that 84% of the participating companies experienced recruitment difficulties, so staff retention is a key issue for business managers.

Businesses can employ a number of strategies to ensure that they hold onto their staff. As companies grow they change, and this often means that the people in place are no longer suitable. At Episys, we have taken a different route. We elected to keep the same people throughout the change process and worked on changing the culture. As a result, we are much more customer focused organisation and our people have helped us achieve this. Three quarters of our staff have been with us for more than three years.

First impressions also count, and 36% of the companies questioned in the CIPD survey are improving their induction process to help manage staff retention. We have formulated an induction program that overcomes the usual first day issues – new joiners never begin on a Monday, or in the morning.

There’s a bottle of champagne to welcome them, the technology required to do their job will be in place, business cards will be ready and a populated dashboard created by the manager will be up and running that shows joiners exactly what their targets are.

A ‘dashboard’ is a document defining their role and responsibilities in detail, actions that need to be secured in the current quarter and a sequence to close on each action.

We also use a ‘buddy’ system, to introduce the new joiner to colleagues and familiarise them with the company. Focusing on customers is sound business sense because they are more likely to provide references that the business can use to win more business. If staff are customer focused, getting agreement for references should be much easier.

We should also remember that nobody’s perfect! As well as rewarding staff for service and hard work, companies need to deal with mistakes differently.

At Episys we don’t sweep mistakes under the carpet, although we all hope to learn from them. We hand out 'I’ve had a shocker' T-Shirts for when staff go the extra mile but don’t quite make it.

Recent incidents include a member of staff leaving a car park and driving the wrong way over pop-up ramps, leaving him with burst tyres; and, an incident at the company barbecue resulted in a ‘barcode’ being burned into the lawn from the barbecue grill.