This guide outlines how to find the best tech talent and retain employees once you hire them.
Remote workforces are the new norm in today’s business landscape. While it started out as a fad, the practice is now slowly becoming more commonplace, thanks in part to a number of strategic benefits that it offers including lower workplace costs and, arguably, better productivity levels. That said, your business’s remote workforce is only as good as the talent behind it. And in order to attract and retain employees who are top talent in any industry, it’s important to cultivate the right balance between financial incentives and workplace culture.
Attact and retain employees in your tech team
Here’s five employee retention strategies for how your business can be a talent magnet and retain employees.
Create a Coaching Culture
Real, sustainable employer-employee engagement comes from a shift in internal instead of external drive. If you want to attract and retain employees within their respective talent pool, you need to help them define their own purpose and fuel their own autonomy and mastery of whatever role they are trying to assume.
Coach your employees and give them the tools they need to be their own autonomous professional rather than just another worker bee in the proverbial corporate hive. Sit with each of them to understand what’s important to them and where they want to be in the next 5 years. What skills do they lack that they feel would benefit them in the future? Where do they see the trends going in their role? Do they want to move up the corporate ladder?
Giving each remote team member their own voice in the organization and letting them know that you support their growth is a huge step in attracting and more importantly retaining top talent.
Cultivate a Sense of Belonging
Another internal shift you want your remote talent to experience in order for them to stay on board is to give them a sense of belonging. Although this may sound challenging since you can’t cultivate that second-family culture with popular in-person bonding activities, like ping-pong or board game nights, you can still apply the tactic over a digital medium to help retain employees.
Look for web-based activities that you can do together with your team, such as online chess or billiards, live streaming a movie, etcetera. Create “digital watercoolers” through informal slack channels. These channels are for people to share memes, joke around and build relationships with team members that they may not have ever met in person.
Encourage Good Work-Life Balance
Today’s generation of workers are especially passionate about work-life balance. And employers who don’t get on board with this new shift in values can find themselves losing prized professionals left and right and failing to retain employees. Benefits you can enforce within your workplace that can advocate for work-life balance are four-day work weeks and extended maternity/paternity leaves.
Go beyond the latest work-life balance trends and make this part of your company culture. Part of that balance is making health, flexibility and employee engagement part of the company culture. Employees can root out insincere buzzwords that promote a balanced life between their personal and professional life. Own it as a company and your employees will feel that you actually care. That culture naturally attracts the best talent and creates a culture of retention.
Throw in Some Financial Incentives
Unarguably the simplest way to attract and retain employees is to pay more or at least offer a better financial perk package. Smart and talented people know how much their time and skills are worth and will not have second thoughts of leaving you if they find better paying work opportunities elsewhere.
Start by offering better healthcare and dental care coverage, childcare stipends, and more aggressive 401K retirement plans that invest in assets like cryptocurrencies. These can set your company apart from others looking to attract top talent.
Today’s young professionals do truly care about culture and work-life balance but there’s no substitute to showing your commitment to their skillsets by supporting them financially. You may consider hiring an outside financial management consultant to help your employees build an investment plan that will give them financial freedom once they retire. This can be a perk that puts your money where your mouth is and be a strong retention perk for employees.
Minimize Sources of Stress
No one wants to work in a stressful environment, especially top talent who know they have other job opportunities on the table. If your remote dashboard tools are outdated or difficult to use, invest in a complete technology overhaul to make it easier for them to manage their tasks, communicate with coworkers, and access/store data. If lines of communication are spotty and a frequent point of friction, invest in better collaboration tools and communication training programs.
Providing the right tools and protocols is the baseline to helping employees do their job without adding additional stress points, and helps to retain employees. Go beyond these basics and build a system that opens up communication across teams in the organization and even up the org chart. One of the biggest points of stress for employees is the sense that they have to go through bureaucracies to get anything done. For example, remove these roadblocks and allow team members to contact finance if there’s difficulty with a budget. Try flattening the org chart to help open up communications and remove stress.
Wrap Up
Attracting and retaining top remote talent can cost you money, but it’s a much more cost-effective strategy for the long haul to retain employees that are top talent, as opposed to rehiring and retraining mediocre employees.
