Editorial
Unforeseen caregiving.
A cross-country move to support a partner or spouse.
A broken ankle that keeps you from driving to work.
These are some of the circumstances that could put someone’s job on ice if the job requires the employee to go into an office. Even if you aren’t a remote-oriented business, you may want to adopt some of the features of a remote setup to retain valued employees rather than lose them to circumstance.
Great employee retention brings continuity-related benefits for employers, employees and clients:
1. Team Resources Saved
Retaining a client is cheaper than winning a new one, and the same is true on the talent front. The money and time spent replacing somebody is almost exponentially worse than retaining them.
When someone leaves, you spend money on ads to find new people. You take leaders out of their regular tasks for resume reviews and interviews. You train newcomers on servicing clients. In the best case, it’ll still be a few months before they’re up to speed. All of that is a dramatic increase in time, effort and opportunity cost. It’s a much better play to keep your employees happy and contributing on a consistent basis.
2. Improved Talent Development
The longer employees are with you, the more effectively your company identifies and develops their skills to improve their contributions to your business. At my digital marketing agency, this means fluency with different channels and measurement methods and development of strategic methodologies that benefit our entire client base. Investing in skills development for employees who will use those skills to keep your clients happy is a win for all parties.
3. Accelerated Career Development
At my agency, we practice alliance agreements, which are regular huddles between employees and management to align on goals and commitments between both the employee and the company. For employees, goals often involve skill development, responsibilities gained, promotions or all of the above.
The longer employees stay at our company, the greater momentum they have to build toward those goals, which are typically important milestones in their career development. Your company might call its career development process something different; no matter the nomenclature, the process is generally more effective the longer employees stay with your company.
4. Stellar Client Service
One of the complaints agencies often hear from clients is that their teams aren’t strongly aligned enough with clients’ business goals. This improves for teams that have been in place for a number of years; over time, clients build trust and satisfaction, and communication becomes more transparent between teams.
One additional benefit of continuity at a remote company is you can do more than keep client teams consistent and aligned; you can assign teams in similar locations, which means that it’s easier to maintain overlap on working hours and keep communication turnaround tight.
5. Client Retention
Anytime clients change from one team to another, or even from one main point of contact to another, there's an adjustment period. Trust me: You can put your company’s biggest rock star on an account to try to appease a client, but it’s hard to combat the idea that a client is simply being passed around if you can’t maintain employee continuity.
When service teams have shaky retention and there’s a revolving door of people working on the client account, that’s a sure path toward a lost client. But if you can keep your most valued and talented employees around for the long haul, that’s a huge asset for client retention.
This is not to say that remote setups are the only path to employee retention and continuity. I’ve worked in more than one office run by a company with stellar retention rates and the benefits that came with them.
But whatever your setup, know that employee retention never just happens. Whether it’s a remote company building a strategic tech stack to accommodate a distributed workforce or an in-person company offering best-in-class compensation in benefits that help keep employees from searching for greener grass, employee retention is a strategic investment with great potential returns for all involved. If you’re an executive looking at constructive criticism or sagging Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS), resist the impulse to get defensive, and consider the hidden costs of losing your employees. It’ll be well worth the resources you spend to keep them.
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Editor's Note: Read more on employee retention:
- Employee Retention Remains a Concern. People Analytics Can Help — Companies spend a lot of time, money and resources to hire the best and brightest talent they can find. People analytics can help you retain them.
- How Does Learning and Development Relate to Employee Retention? — Will providing access to training keep employees from quitting as so many experts predict? Or does that question miss the point?
- Stop Attrition Before It Starts — HR leaders can use employee data they already have to prevent their best people from leaving. Here's how.
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