TribeHR

Surely you already know the advantages of retaining staff, there are many: Less time spent recruiting and onboarding, faster task completion, great relationships, stored organizational knowledge, etc.

When measuring employee morale or tracking projects, pay special attention to medium term employees, as they are most at risk of the seven year itch. If you can identify what bothers them earlier rather than later, you can take steps to improve the situation. These approaches might help:

1. Offer a Role Change

Monotony is everone’s biggest enemy. When employees learn to perform all of their job tasks with enough efficiency, it can quickly become very boring. An ideal job should be appropriately intellectually stimulating. If it isn’t, after some time, productivity can decline quickly.

Talk to employees about their career development, and how they can align their current roles with their aspirations. Maybe they can mentor the next generation of team members? Maybe there’s a similar job in the organization where their knowledge and experience would be very valuable?

If you can frame lateral moves as promotions (either of salary, of responsibility, or both), they’re more likely to be accepted. This can boost your employee’s sense of achievement and self-confidence. A clear development course helps to make employees’ objectives clearer, and gets them more focused.

2. Offer a Break

Sometimes deadline after deadline after deadline burns your employees out. Tremendous work pressure can crack the most dedicated and strong-willed person. You should always encourage your team to cash in the paid time-off that they accumulate. If they don’t have enough, consider offering unpaid time off, a cash incentive to take a vacation, or a company trip.

Employees will return from their break feeling refreshed and eager to work. Vacations are calamine lotion for your 7-year itch.

3. Release them to a different project or team

Sometimes the goals of employees are not aligned with those of their project group. Assigning them to another project or team within the organization can help move employees closer to their goals. Even if one project loses vital resources, another will gain them. In the end, if the employee comes out ahead, the organization does too.

4. Let them go

In the worst case scenario, employees feel trapped in the wrong job and at the wrong company. It’s best that you separate on good terms. Help your employee find a new job. For example, a software programmer may want to become a professional photographer, or an unhappy accountant may want to run her own restaurant.

Be civil and help them pursue their dreams. If it doesn’t work out, they’ll be more likely to come back to your organization, or to refer a friend or colleague who would be successful in their old job.

Track employee projects to make sure that they’re working on things they enjoy. Get started on TribeHR today with a free 60-day trial.

Lean Recruiting [Expert Insights]

Many have embraced the ease and efficiency of recruiting through social media, and while Ramy Nassar is too, an advocate of this technological advance, still he maintains the importance of personal connections within the hiring process.

Ramy Nassar, Myplanet Digital

Nassar currently functions as business development for Myplanet, a tech startup based out of Markham, where he initially began working on recruitment programs. He formerly worked in business development at RIM, and also has experience software engineering.

When asked for Myplanet’s lean recruitment take on hiring, he explains, “I think we just do things a little bit differently in a way, but the reason we do it in that process and that order is sort of to get out of the box a little bit.” Being active in the community through social events and networking with like-minded individuals is a great place to start. Nassar recalls, “We would just do things like have them come hang out in our office for a day and see what the environment was like.”

Nassar notes that perhaps the most crucial component of lean recruiting methodology in a startup is flexibility; “I think the most important part is that we are always trying to evolve our process, seeing what will work best.” A recent innovation in Nassar’s recruiting techniques has been the recognition that while having a hiring process is important, relentlessly following it may not always be the most efficient approach. Allowing yourself to get caught up in various steps throughout that process gives candidates more time to seek out other options. Here, flexibility could have saved that migration. “It may at times mean we’ve done an interview we wouldn’t have done otherwise, but at the same time it also prevents us from losing out on someone who may have gone somewhere else,” he says, on the advantages of being flexible.

In addition, Nassar says, “I think the biggest thing that we’re doing is trying to do things a little bit more backlog style.” Coordinating several times a week on sprint planning and meetings moves Myplanet toward the goal of “more agile processes in general” – that same agility mirrored within their recruiting approach.

Recognizing your limitations as a smaller company is also important. For example, Nassar quickly found that trying to recruit through campus visits was an ineffective method, because students were less engaged when they weren’t familiar with the company. In his experience, “You don’t necessarily have the pull that you think you do,” which further emphasizes the imperativeness of becoming a visible brand in your community.

Conversely, small businesses benefit from the advantage of recognizing inefficiencies and making changes without being bogged down by masses of corporate red tape. “The quicker we can find out what doesn’t work and the quicker we can cut that out, I think that’s one of the biggest advantages we have [as a smaller organization],” Nassar believes. “That’s a big part of being lean and being agile as well, sort of knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.”

Lindsay Purchase interviewed Ramy Nassar on behalf of Workplace Tribes in May 2012.

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