Laleh Hassibi, PayScale
Retention was a hot issue in the 2014 Compensation Best Practices report with nearly 60% of you listing it as a top concern. Now that we’re almost three quarters of the way through the year, we’re checking in with you to find out what the status is now. Please take this 30 second survey to answer 4 short questions about the current state of retention and the talent market. You’ll be able to compare your answers to all the others we’ve received as soon as you are done with the survey.
Survey
Retaining high performers and re-recruiting those on board already is more important that attracting and hiring new employees because of the time it takes to train new people and teach them the “culture” of your workplace.
Also, if current employees see that they’re not valued and there’s no differential between high performing and low performing individuals for aspects such as work assignments, pay for performance, and recognition, turnover rates will continue to increase.
Our problem is finding skilled hourly production workers. The salaried professional, managerial positions have not been a problem.
Compensation & Benefits
Its more than compensation; its workload, stress and effective communication. The communication encompasses everything from performance recognition via employer to issues vocalized by the individual employees. Compensation is a major factor and moreso when those other factors begin to increase pressure and affect motivation. If employees aren’t “happy” there is a point that no amount of money offered can compensate for the other areas. However, if they aren’t compensated correctly to begin with then you have already begun the spiral down and increase the potential turnover and retention becomes an even larger.
Nicole nailed it dead on the head. If your business is fraught with management incompetence, passing blame, coercion, lack of direction and no communication to employees then higher pay is not going to be an incentive. Especially when the job market is now stronger than it has been since approx. 2008.
Take it from someone who recently left their job despite a significant increase in salary.
Retention of high performers, value-adding performers is a challenge, many organisation are facing. The solutions are multi-ple, yet, it depends on the individual whether to remain in the job or to leave the company altogether. Compensation and benefits has been a yardstick for so long, not any more. Organisational culture is another, when the latter is not conducive, regardless of the compensation and benefits, the employee will go elsewhere. Much is about income and culture and leadership. As a people, there is always an exit, and change had to do with it.
Compensation is important, however, our business is surrounded by big industry that we just cannot compete with wage-wise. So, we DO have trouble competing for the same demographic of hiree. So, we pay higher than our direct competition, and offer better culture and work/life balance than local industry.