The war for talent retention continues to intensify. PwC’s 23rd Annual Global CEO Survey found 74% of CEOs are concerned about the shortage of key skills necessary to grow their businesses. Furthermore, “The Great Resignation” continues. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that quit rates increased in November by 3%, resulting in 6.3 million people giving notice and moving on. In the current climate, businesses need a strategy designed for retaining talent that’s based on more than intuition and guesswork. Holding on to top talent requires analysis of people data and proactive planning to minimize the chances that your team will look for employment elsewhere.
Auditing and Optimizing the Employee Experience for Talent Retention
A successful employee talent retention strategy requires evaluating several factors, but the first is employee experience. Business leaders and their management teams must do what they can to clearly communicate expectations and priorities, streamline processes so your team is productive and can have the satisfaction of a good day’s work, and create a positive work environment.
However, to ensure you are supporting employee experiences that inspire long careers with your company, you also need to find a way to evaluate work from the employee’s point of view. Job satisfaction is directly tied to retaining talent, but unfortunately, it can be difficult to monitor and measure. The best course to track employee behaviors, usage, and activity across your people systems, analyze that data, and make decisions based on those insights to improve employee experiences.
Analyzing people data can provide you with insights, such as:
- Predictive attrition analytics
- Organizational network analytics
- Preference analytics
- Behavior analytics
Key Strategies and Metrics for Retaining Talent
With a cloud people analytics platform, your organization can build and implement a three-step employee talent retention plan that gets results:
- Understand: The first step in increasing retention is to understand why employees leave. Gather all usage and activity data, both qualitative and quantitative, from sources including systems, surveys, focus groups, reviews, chats, and email. An experienced data analysis partner can be invaluable in harvesting data, some of which will be unstructured and from external sources so that it’s ready for analysis. Listening to employees, both literally and through data analysis, is key to understanding how likely your team is to remain with your company.
- Analyze: Insights from people analytics allow you to identify issues with employee experiences, job satisfaction, employee mental health and well-being, and other turnover indicators. You may learn that your team sees a lack of flexibility or opportunities for career advancement or needs more training to feel confident in their roles. Pinpoint challenges, then, with the data available to you, determine how to address them and close gaps.
- Implement and Optimize: The final step is to design and implement mitigation strategies, the most successful of which will involve employees in decision making so that they develop a sense of ownership. Furthermore, developing a network of game-changer employees who champion the strategy can build enthusiasm and momentum that leads to better outcomes – not only with regard to retaining talent, but also employee performance. A University of Oxford study found that happy employees are 13% more productive than their discontented peers. After you launch your initiative, keep it on track by managing change through coaching and people analytics tools. It’s vital to establish standards and continually track progress – remember you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
Discover the Full ZeroedIn Cloud People Analytics Suite
ZeroedIn’s cloud people analytics suite offers everything you need to support each phase of your employee talent retention strategy, from understanding who is leaving and why and how to mitigate the risks that someone else in a similar role will be next.
However, our analytics concierge is only one part of our complete cloud people analytics suite, which also includes:
- Role-based dashboards
- Collaborative data rooms
- Management scorecards
- Integrated surveys
- Predictive talent indicators
When you take full advantage of our service and technology your organization can discover and deliver vital insights to boost efficiency, improve communication, and uncover the potential of dormant people data. Those insights may also include an increase in job satisfaction and a team of people who aren’t looking for opportunities to work anywhere else.
