Dayton Employers: How to Keep Your Top Talent Onboard
Despite all that we have been through as a society in the past few years — or perhaps because of it—competition is fierce for top talent in Dayton and beyond. Local companies are struggling to fill their open positions as the long-tail impacts of COVID-19 continue to rumble through the economy.
Hiring and keeping good people can seem even more challenging for companies in mid-sized cities like ours than for companies in big cities like Chicago. Fortunately, Dayton is a great place to live and work. Our city is primed to attract talent as large cities’ rising cost of living chase out talented folks. Compared to larger cities, we also have lower overhead costs for business, a relative lack of traffic, good schools, and cultural gems. On top of that, many young people drawn to cities 10 or 15 years ago are starting to grow weary of gentrification and cookie-cutter development.
The appeal of cities like Dayton has never been greater, and local employers have an opportunity to attract top talent and keep it. As a top staffing agency in Dayton, we’re seeing all kinds of people take a renewed interest in our city.
Why Should Employers Prioritize Employee Retention?
While there are recruitment challenges for companies in Dayton, employers also need to do a good job of keeping their best workers. Minimizing employee churn is essential to productivity, efficiency, and quality. Employee retention is also central to maintaining a vibrant brand and company culture.
If you can’t hold on to top talent, your organization will have difficulty delivering on its unique value proposition. It’s also hard to grow if you’re constantly churning through employees. High turnover also creates a negative feedback loop, making attracting good people difficult. Simply put, high turnover creates unnecessary risk for your organization.
The most effective way to boost employee retention is to stop employees from quitting. That might sound extremely simple, but the idea has real wisdom. If your people are happy with their work, who they work with, and their compensation, they’re much more likely to stay with your company for many years.
It’s important to note: Don’t wait until people are quitting in bunches to focus on employee retention. Don’t use counteroffers as the main way to keep your top people. This reactive approach comes across as insincere, and it’s usually inadequate. Think back to the times you voluntarily left a job. It probably wasn’t an overnight decision. As soon as someone has started regularly applying to other positions, keeping them becomes much more challenging.
Dayton’s Staffing and Recruiting Experts Share 5 Tips to Enhance Retention
Suppose your company may be susceptible to losing great workers, or you have already started losing your top talent. In that case, it is time to think about improving your employee retention tactics.
Meaningful work, a positive environment, and competitive compensation are important to employees. For example, your employees will leave a positive work environment and good pay if their work isn’t engaging. Awareness of what matters to your people and what results in their leaving is the starting point for creating a useful employee retention system.
We aren’t afraid to say that we have the best recruiters in Dayton, and they regularly work with companies to help them retain top talent. With this in mind, consider the following five tips for employee retention.
Focus on Creating a Positive Work Culture
Your employee’s positive work experience should start on Day 1. A well-thought-out onboarding process makes new employees feel accepted and boosts their trust in your company. They’ll be more likely to appreciate the people around them and care about achieving early success in their new role. They’ll also feel supported enough to ask questions and proactively learn by doing.
It’s also important to show trust in your employees, whether they are on their first day or have been with your company for many years. Micromanaging is a classic sign of distrust and a red flag for a toxic environment. People who are micromanaged are more likely to feel anxious, insecure about their work, and less satisfied with their positions. When you micromanage good people, you’re asking them to start looking for another job.
Companies with a positive work culture also look to provide meaning to their employees. If your employees feel their work doesn’t matter in the big picture, they’ll become jaded and disengaged. They’ll also be more open to finding work that they care about. Your employees don’t need to feel like they are saving the world but want to feel like their skills and knowledge matter. Treating employees interchangeably will make them feel like a number and act accordingly.
Provide Upskilling Opportunities
When people think they have hit a wall in their careers with your company, they believe the only way to get ahead is to go somewhere else. Larger companies usually have the luxury of regularly offering opportunities for promotion. However, career growth is much more than getting a new title and a marginally bigger paycheck.
Upskilling is a great way to keep your employees feeling like they are growing as professionals. You don’t need a massive budget to provide upskilling opportunities to your workers. Cross-training, job shadowing, mentoring, and other programs are low-cost approaches to helping your people grow. As a bonus, you’re also developing your workforce, which has all kinds of benefits for your organization.
Encourage a Healthy Work-Life Balance
Regarding self-fulfillment, our professional identity is only one part of what makes us special. If your company is causing employees’ work-life balance to get out of whack, it isn’t good on many levels. Your employees might find their work highly meaningful and fulfilling. However, they all have lives outside of it, and a very demanding work situation can make it difficult for the rest of their lives. This also has a reciprocal effect. If something goes wrong in our personal lives, our work starts to suffer.
Investing in employee well-being is one of the most effective ways to keep top talent. First and foremost, it helps to reduce burnout and boost morale. But besides being great for your employees, supporting a work-life balance is good for the organization.
One great way to do this is to offer schedule flexibility. If some tasks can be done remotely, find a way to allow remote or hybrid working. Some jobs require people to be in-person, but even these positions can include some degree of flexibility. Shift trading, 10-hour shifts, and other schedule measures are proven ways to support employees’ work-life balance.
It’s also important to support worker well-being in multiple ways. Many companies use employee wellness initiatives to decrease stress and support overall health. Ensure that your staff is working ergonomically and people doing physical work take proper care of their bodies. Encourage people to regularly use their vacation time for their mental and physical health. Make sure people in management are taking their vacation time to model the behavior for your front-line workers. Demonstrate trust in your staff members by letting them work in ways that best suit them. In addition to supporting well-being, this also builds trust, confidence, and morale.
Ask for Feedback
Every workplace involves a relationship between management and workers. As with any relationship, listening closely to what is and isn’t being said is essential. Strong two-way communication is critical for collaboration and problem-solving. It’s also good for morale. If your people feel like they can’t express themselves, they will be more likely to go for a new job where they can.
Maintaining good communication also helps when it comes to improving retention efforts. If you would like to know what’s working and what isn’t, it’s easier to ask if you already have an ongoing constructive dialogue. Make giving feedback as easy as possible for your team members. Prioritize active listening during one-on-one and group meetings. Look to apply suggestions where possible and provide feedback on popular suggestions that could not be implemented. Being a transparent and honest broker helps to build trust and foster a positive company culture.
Collaborate with a Reputable Staffing and Recruiting Agency
Employee retention starts with bringing in the right people, and a staffing agency in Dayton is well-suited to finding the best-fit talent for your organization. Recruiters in Dayton maintain a pool of local talent that their clients can access as needed. Temp staffing services in Dayton are also a great way to bring in supplemental workers and keep your full-time staff members from burning out. Recruiters in Dayton can provide your company with full-time, temporary, or temp-to-hire talent based on your company’s current labor needs.
Maximize Talent Retention by Partnering with a Staffing Agency in Dayton, Ohio
At Crown Personnel, we’re one of Dayton’s top local companies for full-time recruitment and temp staffing services. If your company needs to hire clerical, light industrial, or skilled trade professionals for its open positions, our recruiters can quickly source top candidates for your review. If your company wants temp staffing services in Dayton, we can help you develop a custom staffing solution. Feel free to contact us today to discuss your talent needs.