Advice from a recruiter: How to retain staff in a difficult market

In our conversations with the market we often focus on how to best enable your career mobility – whether that’s by finding a new opportunity or building a fantastic team. Whilst that is obviously a crucial part of any individual career journey, so too is how to retain staff in a market directed by competition and extremely high levels of demand for the best staff.

As the fight for talent becomes even more desperate, there’s a few things we believe you can do to enable yourselves to retain the talent you have whilst continuing to grow and attract the best in the market.

Flexible working practices

Of course, no work talk in 2022 would be complete without the talk of flexibility at work. We’re not going to tell you exactly what you should implement, but we are going to tell you to think carefully about it and to be strategic.

Hybrid working seems to be the model that is most attractive to both employees and employers. It enables balances social aspects of work and culture with the ability for your team to be able to get their heads down at home whilst also putting in a load of laundry and making themselves a delicious lunch from their own kitchen.

Of course, offering this to your employees is about offering more than a day without a commute. It’s about showing how much you value their work life balance and so this can extend to initiatives such as core office hours after which no professional contact can be made to enforce working boundaries in days.

Culture

On the subject of culture (one we always love) – what is your businesses? Not every business is centered around a Google style ping pong table and that’s fine but you should have a clear idea of the identity and the atmosphere of your workplace and what about that attracts the people within it.

People want to feel a sense of belonging within every environment they are a part of and this is crucial to a workplace – especially one which you’re in as often physically. How can your culture stretch to those days at home and the practices you employ?

Invest in your employees growth

After a couple of years in which most people felt pretty stagnant in their careers the emphasis on how that can be ramped back up is huge. Across the board, professionals are desperate to learn, progress and achieve and by supporting that you can create an environment in which staff both feel valued and upskill themselves and their abilities whilst at work.

Think about offering flexible options for growth such as professional memberships, career coaching or even more formal educational programs. Group sessions in which people are coached to think outside the box and work together are especially fruitful in fostering culture and individual growth.

Offer fair compensation

This may seem obvious but it’s crucial. Salary is more than a determining factor for staff who want to earn as much as possible for their skills, it’s also a metric of value and appreciation.

If you have regular, structured points in which to assess salary and other compensation, your staff will understand the value you put upon their work. Clarity is also crucial, people will understand as long as you’re clear about pay scales and bonuses within the business.