Improve Hiring and Retention with Employee Communications (Part 2)
Improving retention doesn’t necessarily result from just paying employees more. Many industry studies have shown that people forget about pay raises within four months after receiving them. What typically matters over time is: a supportive work environment, a clear career path, company communication of successes and failures, and how well people integrate with their work group. In other words, when employees adopt stakeholder-employee mentality they stay with employers longer.
So, how can we improve hiring quality and employee retention without focusing on just increasing pay rates?
USING INTERNAL MARKETING TO MINIMIZE TURNOVER
Highly successful construction companies utilize internal marketing to create stakeholder-employees. Stakeholder-employees understand their importance to the business, and have a clear career path laid out for them. When employees know what is potentially “next for them” they are more likely to work towards that goal rather than working towards finding what’s next (like a job with your competitor).
So, how do we begin to create stakeholder-employees? First, the executive team and field supervisors need to be on-boarded. Next, focus on determining and documenting the company’s real culture, mission, and branding statements. Once we can clearly communicate these characteristics of behavior, differentiation and expectations companywide, we can begin developing strategies for communicating the culture across all levels of your organization. This does two things: It sets expectations for behavior, work-quality, accountability, efficiency and profitability, and weeds out the employees who are a bad fit. Yes, it could lead to more turnovers initially, but those employees usually cause serious disruptions if allowed to fester. Without purposefully establishing the culture, “bad fits” can drive away the best employees (the right fits) who truly benefit the company. Having a conflict in culture does not mean an employee is a bad person; he or she is just not the right fit for your business.
As discussed in Part 1, internal marketing is your company’s information dissemination source, and should be utilized to engage and immerse employees in your company and safety cultures, establish expectations, drive safety initiatives, improve efficiency and quality, share employee-family personal achievements, and much more. When employees and sub-contractors feel like they are an integral part of the business and understand their role in the company’s profitability, they have more stakeholdership. Needless to say, stakeholder-employees don’t easily leave a business, disengaged employees do.
IMPLEMENT SOLUTIONS
Put internal marketing to work in your construction company! Experienced construction marketing professionals who understand and work with internal and external marketing systems can design strategies, tools, tactics and logistics to achieve retention goals. Internal marketing systems utilize integrated internal communications to convert your employees into stakeholder-employees. Stakeholder-employees know what’s next for them career-wise, how they specifically impact the bottom-line, when the company is hiring, the type of people it’s looking for, and can effectively communicate the benefits of being on the team.
It’s not possible to cover all the ways internal marketing effects construction company profitability or the various tools companies can use to drive stakeholdership to improve retention in this article, but I can say that companies that have no internal marketing systems are losing good people through unnecessary turnover.