How To Get The Best From Your Staff So They’ll Stay

High Turnover Of Staff And No Idea Why?

Having happy, motivated staff increases your productivity and simply makes your company a better place to work.

We’ve discussed how to hire right and the importance of attitude over skills. But there’s one more vital aspect that you’ll need to get right if you want to hire staff that stay – the job itself.

Gotcha Recruitment, London & Basingstoke

Don’t Recruit To Plug Leaks

Imagine that your customer service department is so busy that no-one has time to do any filing. Orders are going missing and the whole place looks a mess. Your solution? To recruit a junior office assistant to take care of the filing. Perhaps they can do some data entry and make sure that the place looks tidy as well?

Will you find someone? Probably.

Will they stay more than six months? No chance.

This person is being recruited to do a thankless task. No-one notices if the filing is done and the desks are tidy – they only notice when it’s getting out of hand. What you’re doing is hiring someone into a dull job with no prospects. They’ll use you to get some experience and move on when their CV looks better. And who can blame them?

Work Is Personal

Most people want to progress in their work, or at the very least get recognition for their efforts. And paying them is just keeping your side of the agreement – not a reward for doing good work. (If you want to read more about why money is not the best way to motivate people, there’s a great article here.)

The employee who ends up in your dead-end filing job is not going to love their work. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t recruit, you should just do it differently. Let’s go back to our initial problem:

Customer service department is so busy that no-one has time to do any filing. Orders are going missing and the whole place looks a mess.

How about a different approach? You recruit an additional customer service person, maybe on a junior level, and make everyone responsible for their own filing. You’ve added resource by specifying a role that is meaningful and you’ve also sent a message to the rest of the team about their filing. You might not even need a whole full time role – maybe a part time customer service assistant could just take the pressure off the rest of the team.

Ready to recruit staff that stay?

Two things. First and foremost, choose your employees wisely. With special consideration of their personality and values. Secondly, give them proper training and bring them up to speed properly on your own procedures. A simple plan of what to do when a new employee starts is all you need to ensure silly mistakes are avoided. And guess what? We’ve written a plan for you.