7 steps to find and retain quality staff
Finding and retaining quality staff, whether you’re hiring employees or contractors, can be a difficult task for many contractors. There are a myriad of reasons why this is true. It takes a strategic and focused approach to recruiting and growing your team that will help drive you and your business forward.
Sometimes, though, no matter how well you’ve hired and how many “good hire” strategies you have in place, it just doesn’t work and you have to start over. Starting over by hiring and training a new employee or even bringing a contractor up to speed on what they need to do is taxing, physically and emotionally on the employer and financially on the business.
How can you find and retain quality staff?
Here are 7 steps to take that can help you increase your success.
- Be very clear about what you want the person to do. If you hire someone and you think he’s doing A and you want him to do B and maybe C, and you didn’t tell him from the start, he might balk and walk away. If you hire for task A but then add B and C without additional compensation, you may have to rehire them or pay to train them, if you’re interested. If you thought you were hiring for A, B, and C, you need to be clear about the tasks and expectations for everyone’s benefit.
- Leave the door open for the negotiation of tasks and responsibilities. You can hire someone who far exceeds your expectations and your business will grow. You may get to the point where, due to growth, you need to hire a new person who can take on the D and E tasks. Don’t forget to ask the original employee if she is able or willing to take on those tasks. new tasks, if they have the skill set to do them. Don’t overlook the opportunity to promote from within. Just because you’ve signed a person to ABC doesn’t mean that person doesn’t have other hidden talents that you’ve never discussed. The people who take you to one level may or may not be the same people who will help you reach your next level of success.
- Have a very clear and specific written job description. It is not enough to simply say what you want done. Provide the new team member with a detailed job description, not so detailed that it’s new, but detailed enough that you both understand and agree to the deliverables.
- Be open to suggestions about possible changes in procedures. If you have a new member of staff looking at some of your current procedures (assuming you have all the tasks documented, which most companies don’t) and can streamline them, ask for more detail on what you’re proposing. If they can help make things easier, more efficient, or better in some way, encourage them to do so.
- Treat your new employee as a member of the team. Nobody wants to work with a dictator or a micromanager. If you were clear about your hiring requirements, you should be able to rest assured that the tasks you’re hiring for are ones you can delegate and trust the new hire to do on your behalf.
- Train the new employee. Yes, he is hiring the best expert for the job he needs to do, BUT this new person needs to know how he wants things done. Just because they were bookkeepers in your previous position doesn’t mean they’ll approach your books the way you expect. Before you can train, you need to have a clear idea of the tasks you are delegating. Again, this may be a time to say, “We need to do A, this is how we’ve always done it. Give them a procedure manual to review each procedure. Do you have any suggestions on how to streamline the process?” Don’t make them respond right away. Give them time to adjust and then discuss the task again. If you throw a new employee into the fray without training, it will be frustrating for both of you and take much longer to get up to speed than necessary.
If you don’t currently have documented procedures for all the activities required for each job, you need to make sure they are all documented. This is very important for many reasons. Have the new person document everything as you train them (or update the existing process, if one exists), so you’ll have these procedures as up-to-date as possible in the future.
- Ask a leaving employee why they decided to leave. A short exit interview is a great learning tool for you. Why did they leave? Money? Working hours? Misplaced expectations? Tired of being the only A player among the C players on the team? Don’t make the exit interview an interrogation. Let the person know that you are genuinely interested in why they are leaving. You may or may not take that information and use it to try and get them to stay, but then again, it may be revealing enough that the two of you can find a way to work and stay together (if it makes sense). ). If someone leaves for more money, it’s usually not a winning game for you, the employer, to up the ante so that person stays. Eventually, they may come back and say that someone else offered them more money and that you will match it; you could be on a barrel at that time. However, if you find that you were paying well below industry standards for the tasks this person was doing, it makes sense for you to assess their pay scale.
What is your biggest challenge when hiring a new staff member or contractor? Do you do exit interviews and actually look at the comments? How can you be even better at recruiting and retaining great people who will help your business grow? How often should you interview people to ensure you have the best people possible on your team?
Download your courtesy support team performance evaluation, so you can customize it for your team and make them even more accountable. Great communication tool. https://www.accountabilitycoach.com/support-team-member-progress-assessment/