Consultant’s blog: Do you know what’s expected of you?
It's that time of year when many staff are due to sit down and have their annual performance review with their manager.
| While connecting with employees at all levels is no easy task, finding out what employees really think is an important first step to aligning employee behaviours with your organisation’s strategy. From that point you can focus your efforts on improving areas such as employee engagement and talent retention. |
How using organisation alignment helps employee engagement and talent retention
Strategies aimed at increasing leadership retention and growth must focus on talent management and engaging your employees. By doing this you’ll retain organisation specific knowledge and minimise money spent on recruitment and training of new staff. You’ll also avoid organisational disruption.
Talent management involves a series of processes including:
- workforce planning
- talent gap analysis
- recruitment
- education
- development
- succession planning
- evaluation
But most importantly, to drive organisational performance and create sustainable high performance, your talent management processes must be aligned to your organisation’s goals and aspirations.
Your strategies for retaining key staff and engaging employees must be based around leadership development at all levels of your organisation. Managers are critical to retention of talent and building employee engagement.
How do your employees perceive your organisation’s actions with regard to its goals?
Insync Surveys’ employee Alignment and Engagement Survey helps you discover if staff:
- clearly understand their roles and the part they play in fulfilling your organisation’s aspirations
- collaborate effectively towards organisational initiatives
- are actually committed to achieving your goals
Organisation alignment can create employee engagement, retain talent and protect your bottom line
Absenteeism links to alignment and employee engagement
Warning bells will ring with high levels of absenteeism which comes with huge costs. Research we helped the Australian Industry Group deliver suggests that more than 50% of your employees’ “sickies” aren’t genuine. This costs Australian businesses in excess of $7 billion a year. The research goes on to show that every 1% of absenteeism costs organisations more than $1000 per employee each year. So if your firm has 500 employees you can save $500,000 per year by improving absenteeism by just 1%.
Some companies reported absenteeism as high as 9% a year, so it’s not hard to see the bottom line benefits for building an environment where your employees are motivated to come to work.
If you don’t address issues at the absenteeism stage, the next blow is the effect of unplanned voluntary turnover as a result of low employee engagement. You’ll be saying farewell to critical revenue, your training investment will go down the drain, essential customer and partner relationships will be scarred, precious organisational knowledge will be lost, not to mention enormous business disruption and stress placed on remaining team mates. On top of all that, you also need to get ready to open your wallet for hefty recruitment charges, induction expenses and overtime payments.
Employees don’t leave the organisation, they leave their manager
The bitter era of downsizing and outsourcing means it’s hard to gain employee trust and loyalty. Employees have given up on guaranteed continued employment with the same organisation and instead seek development so they’re more employable by other organisations.
Every employee’s level of willingness to deliver is limited. The challenge with employee engagement is making employees feel their work experience is worthwhile, while also ensuring it compliments your organisation’s chosen path. It all comes back to having good leaders in your organisation who employees want to work for.
