Invest in Recruiting and Hiring Top Talent
As we start the New Year, we want to remind managers and leaders about an important – but sometimes overlooked aspect of a strong talent strategy – retention! Organizations often invest heavily in recruiting and hiring new talent.
Create or Define a Retention Strategy
Once talented, mission driven team members are hired, the next crucial step is to inspire, develop and retain and develop staff and them. In today’s job market, this becomes especially important to ensure your organization can keep top talent. As an organization, define the skills and attributes you want to build in your staff and make the needed investments to provide these regularly.
Develop Your People
Research shows that organizations that invest in and develop their staff and leaders are better able to keep them. How you approach this really varies depending on your organizational capacity and culture. You can opt to create your own internal program or partner with another organization to offer development opportunities for your team. Below are a few suggestions :
- Create a mentoring/coaching program – this can prove to be a cost-effective way to provide a stretch experience for more experienced leaders and provide support for newer or more junior level staff. Organizations can be creative with this approach and establish 1:1 mentoring partnerships or establish small cohorts hen possible!
- Include supervisors and staff in setting professional development goals during annual performance evaluations so that these are embedded into an already established cycle of performance management.
Give Staff a Voice
As an organization, determine what areas would benefit most from staff input. Following are some examples we’ve seen be successful with teams:
- Conduct an annual staff survey focused on organizational culture, job satisfaction, resources and effective supervision, to name a few. that can be a nationally benchmarked tool like Gallup’s Q12 Employee Engagement Survey.
- Develop a plan to share results, celebrate strengths y and create a measurable plan to address opportunities for improvement. This is a crucial step because transparency and accountability develop trust.
- Create an internal advisory group that includes team members from diverse parts of the organization to ensure ownership for actions connected to this work.
- Be consistent and repeat your commitments annually.
A focus on staff retention has never been more important. Investing time and resources to elevate staff voice and to develop a strong professional development program will not only ensure greater retention, but allow your organization the ability to deliver on its mission in service to children and families.