How to Retain Your Best Employees with Remote Talent Management

Aug 11, 2021
How to Retain Your Best Employees with Remote Talent Management

The COVID-19 outbreak has put a lot of things into uncertainty for all of us. With more people working from home now, many traditional workspace management methods for employees are losing relevance.

The old ways of retaining employees through a friendly working environment or compensation are not enough. Employees are now looking for work-life balance, better avenues for growth and stability, allowing them to advance in their careers and maximize their potential.

With a fresh approach to sustain in the 'new normal, let's decode how to retain your best employees with remote talent management. Here are the top 5 tips to follow:

1. Strike the proper managerial balance

To achieve success in a remote setup, it is important to strike a balance between responsibility and accountability. In other words, managers must ensure that their team members are well equipped with the resources to execute a given task diligently. At the same time, the team leads need to instill a sense of accountability in their respective teams to ensure ownership of completing a task.

Unfortunately, when managers cannot regulate processes remotely, they micromanage teams due to a lack of effective communication and trust in team members. That becomes part of the company culture.

Effective talent management is the key to resolving such managerial issues and striking a fine work-life balance. For instance, coming up with flexible timings is a great way to let your employees work more effectively without being pushed to meet deadlines. Using an employee timesheet app can help manage the teams in a streamlined fashion, where everyone is aware of their responsibilities and reporting.

Fixing deadlines based on priority is ideal for managing important tasks without burning out time on irrelevant things. Also, giving complete ownership of the job to the employees goes a long way in acknowledging their worth.

2. Check in with your teammates regularly

We are living in the most precarious age. Be it our economic state or life in general, it will take a while for everything to get back on track. In such times, it is vital to have a support system and find ways to help each other.

From an organizational point of view, a one-on-one catch-up session (virtually) can be a great way to check on your teammates. That way, you can track your team's performance in a working environment while getting some honest feedback on how things are working out from them. These meetings can be an excellent opportunity to discuss career development goals and how companies can help their employees achieve them.

Additionally, from an employer's standpoint, it is crucial to think about employee wellness. After all, we spend almost 60% of our active hours at work. What happens in the workplace, even remote ones, significantly impacts an employee's overall health. So, do ensure that your workplace is a happy place for your employees to thrive—emotionally and physically.

Simple policies like a health spending account, insurance cover, or something as basic as a gym membership can show that employers care about their employees' holistic well-being. That can go a long way in earning their loyalty towards the company.

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3. Provide learning opportunities

One of the most critical factors that promote employee retention is how well an organization supports an individual's career growth. There is no point in staying within a team that has reached a saturation point and offers nothing new for members to learn or grow. Eventually, that motivates them to look out for opportunities and move on.

By providing learning opportunities, employers can retain their best teammates and bring out the best of their capabilities. Now with a large portion of working professionals stuck working from home, keep an eye out for activities that will engage them and improve work-life balance, and at the same time, allow them to upskill themselves. 

Your company might hand out in-house training materials, but it's also good to offer your team training courses from external parties who specialize in a particular domain. 

For example, Amazon’s Career Choice program is a pre-paid tuition program for associates looking to get into high-demand occupations. Amazon pays up to 95% of tuition fees to help its employees get certified, leading to lucrative employment opportunities for in-demand jobs. Amazon has pledged $700 million in upskilling and training across several departments.

In short, by allowing your team members to utilize their routine workday in nurturing their skills would be a win-win situation for you and your employees. That way, you also give a big reason to employees to stick to your company as you have invested in their success and personal development. In other words, it’s a great strategy for retaining employees.

Additionally, when one team member attends a training course, ask them to share their learnings in the next meeting. That will help you encourage a company culture that promotes self-improvement and peer learning.  

4. Keep an eye out for indicators of employee dissatisfaction

Remember when I told you to check on your teammates regularly? Here's another reason why you shouldn't miss out on your meetings. Catching up daily with your teammates can help you retain good employees by identifying the key triggers of employee dissatisfaction.

Job dissatisfaction is one of the most common reasons for employee attrition. If we talk numbers, a study published by Economic Times shows that 8 out of 10 employees are dissatisfied with their job. Therefore, it's essential to keep an eye out for the indicators that are making your employees unhappy at work.

With effective communication, you can recognize the issues that might be bothering your team members at an initial stage before they become a reason to leave the company. In other words, communication is key to retaining employees. SMART goals are another way to track employee performance.

Employee dissatisfaction can be related to their workload, compensation, working hours, or just not getting enough time at home. As a manager, we must take complete responsibility for our employees’ mental and physical well-being by addressing these triggers from time to time in a working environment.

As employers, it is reasonable to say that you can't make everyone happy. But what matters here the most is acknowledging the problem and making efforts to mend it. Your employees would appreciate the fact that they are heard even if they’re far away working from home or from somewhere else.

Job dissatisfaction is one of the biggest roadblocks to productivity. It promotes absenteeism, dips employee morale, and eventually hampers an organization's progress. So, you must take every possible step to ensure that your employees are satisfied with their job. The key to retaining employees is to talk it out and not push things under the rug.

5. Increase recognition

One of the effective ways to ensure employee job satisfaction--and therefore to retain employees---is by acknowledging their work. It's a human tendency to feel good when you are welcomed and appreciated for your efforts.

It may seem like a no-brainer to reward the employees who are being praised across teams. But even the best managers let things slip away when it comes to keeping abreast with everyone's performance. It's often no fault of their own but of a poor employee management system that fails to manage teamwork and rewards. Keep track of your team members’ tasks, their performance, and everything in between so that it's easy for you to recognize the hard-working members even if they’re out of your sight, working from home or elsewhere. 

Given the lack of transparency in a remote setup, try to upgrade your monitoring techniques and direct reporting processes. Sarah Wilson, Head of HR at Right Inbox recommends the use of simple polls or surveys to ask specific questions to track output and identify various areas of recognition.

By catching up with employees virtually in regular intervals while they’re working from home or elsewhere, you will ascertain what hurdles they have overcome, how they have been team players or helped their peers meet specific goals. These meetings will allow you to pinpoint various aspects to recognize, thank, and acknowledge your employees' accomplishments.

Recognition doesn't always need to be monetary. Consider appreciating your team members publicly, passing on little tokens of appreciation through virtual cards, or giving low-cost perks like dinner coupons, among others.  Team leaders at organizations facing a slowdown can take employee recognition as an opportunity to offer development avenues to their teammates.

Bottom Line

Effective talent management is crucial in retaining employees working in a remote setupand perhaps never more so than right now.

As companies adapt to the 'new normal in the wake of a global pandemic, many companies struggle to know how best to help their employees and execute an effective talent management program in these challenging times. 

By striking a balance between micromanagement and being too easy, checking on your employees, providing learning opportunities, increasing recognition, and minimizing employee dissatisfaction, you can effectively manage your workforce remotely and retain your best resources. 

Follow these steps to develop a leadership approach that keeps your best employees happy and engaged.

About Author: Owen Jones is the Senior Content Marketer at ZoomShift, an online schedule maker app. He is an experienced SaaS marketer, specializing in content marketing, CRO, and FB advertising. He likes to share his knowledge with others to help them increase results.

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