6 proven ways to retain your top talent

Six tried and tested ways franchisees can engage and retain their best employees

Your people are one of the most powerful forces available to you in realising your goals and ambitions and the way you think about your people strategy is critical to your commercial and business success.

One of your business’ greatest assets walks out the door every night. Here’s how to get them to return the next day inspired, motivated and enthused to be the best they can be:

1. Make your employee value proposition compelling

A compelling value proposition is a key differentiator for your business in achieving competitive advantage. Similarly, your employee value proposition is a key differentiator in your people strategy.

Your EVP is critical in helping you achieve ‘employer of choice’ status. Put simply, it’s the balance of the rewards and benefits received by your employees in return for the skills, capabilities, experience and performance they bring to your organisation. Your EVP should be employee centred and designed based on an understanding of what is important to your existing and potential employees.

2. Understand your people’s ‘why’

One of the keys to unlocking a motivational environment is to understand your people’s personal goals and how being successful at work can be one of the vehicles and enablers in helping them realise them.

The moment you create the bridge in their mind - the link between their personal goals, business goals and what they do daily during work - self-motivation kicks in. This is the defining moment a person changes from someone with a job to someone with a purpose. While the motivation to do so must come from within, the triggers that compel them to make the switch are ones an organisation and its leaders can create.

3. Set your people up for success

If you asked your people what great performance looks, feels and acts like in their role, how aligned would their answer be with your version? There should be one version of the truth and, in my experience, perception and reality are often misaligned.

If you haven’t created absolute clarity about what the expectations are for their role, explained and demonstrated what great looks like and set them up for success, chances are you and your people will be working to different models and interpretations of what great looks like.

Create clarity of purpose for your people. Enable them with the mindset, skillset and the tools to do their job, which will unlock their potential and deliver excellence within their role, while fuelling their inner self-worth, igniting their self-motivation and building their confidence and loyalty.

4. Get the right people in the right roles

Most people challenges come about because the wrong people are in the wrong roles. Have you heard the mantra: hire for attitude and train for skill? One core element of your people proposition should be hiring individuals whose personal values are in sync with the values that make your business tick. In this scenario, character counts far more than their credentials.

Don’t get me wrong, if you need to recruit a technically qualified individual - an accountant, for example - then clearly the individual must be a qualified accountant to fulfil the requirements of the role from day one. But once they’ve met this essential requirement of the position, you can still apply the hire for attitude and train for skill mantra.

Define the type of person who will thrive in your business - their skills, attributes, personality and experience. From this, you can determine the kind of individuals who will fit culturally and, ultimately, whether they’re the right person for the job. There is no right or wrong, just what’s right for you and your business at this point.

5. Remember, it’s not all about the money

In a world that has become impersonal, it’s the little things that make a big difference. Personal job satisfaction is driven by far more than financial factors such as salary and benefits. Therefore, your EVP must have the right blend of nonmonetary rewards.

Increasingly, non-monetary rewards are becoming key differentiators that are highly valued by employees. These include relocation services, career development, choice of work location and flexibility to spend time with children and attend school functions and sports days.

6. View your people as an investment not a cost

When I ask business owners, business leaders and entrepreneurs what their most significant asset is, I routinely get the response: “It’s our people”. Yet most businesses don’t act that way.

There is a disconnection between words and actions, reflected in one significant phrase: human resources. The term demotes people from being intuitive, instinctive, intelligent and innovative individuals to merely being a collective resource at the company’s command.

This attitude plays out elsewhere too: on a company’s profit and loss statement, people typically fall into the category of ‘overhead’ not ‘investment’.

Businesses that consider people as merely a paid resource have difficulty retaining good staff and generally end up overpopulated with underperformers. Businesses that value people as their greatest asset and demonstrate it through their actions are positioned to get the best out of all employees while retaining their top performers - a catalyst for business growth.

The author

Royston Guest is CEO of Pathways Global and a leading authority on growing businesses and unlocking people potential