Do Your Employees See a Future With Your Company?
For HR teams and business leaders, there are few things more concerning than your company being viewed as a place with no opportunity to grow.
It’s the kiss of death when it comes to both employee retention and talent acquisition.
We’ve talked about how to tackle low employee engagement survey scores. However, what we might not have talked about is how to tackle the trickiest area: career growth. A low score next to the “Career Growth” section of the annual employee engagement survey reflects the grim situation above.
SEE ALSO: How To Solve Low Employee Engagement Survey Scores
It should be noted that this is something that HR teams all across the world are trying to get right. Being seen as a company that walks the walk when it comes to promoting career growth the exception, not the norm.
Here are three practical, actionable ways you can ensure your employees envision their future at your company.
Improve visibility into your internal opportunities
Ask an artist to paint a picture of the talent landscape today, and undoubtedly, the result will show a buyer’s market. Pushy recruiters constantly reaching out with shiny new opportunities. Tools such as LinkedIn Jobs are allowing recruiters to pay for jobs to be targeted at the right candidates. People are quitting their jobs at historically high rates.
“87% of active and passive candidates are open to new job opportunities.” - Source, The Ultimate List of Hiring Statistics for Hiring Managers, HR Professionals and Recruiters
It’s an ugly scene from a retention perspective. However, it begs the question...do your employees actually know about the in-house opportunities available to them?
Most companies’ internal roles are only posted via referrals and internal job boards - a far cry from the heavy resources piled into general recruiting outlined above. Moreover, your company has hired those same recruiters to look outside of the company to hire for those roles.
If these tactics sound familiar to the situation at your company, you’re not unusual—however, it’s not surprising that your employees don’t feel like there’s room to grow. They simply don’t see internal opportunities pop up as much as external ones.
It seems overly simple, but the small act of improving visibility by promoting your internal career opportunities can make a big impact on retention. You can experiment with incentive-laden referral programs, or post your roles exclusively in your internal job board for 30 or 60 days before even allowing external candidates to apply.
Help employees see how they fit long-term into the company’s plans
Regardless of reporting structures (which differ from organization to organization) employees should feel like they have access to both their managers and HR leaders when it comes to their career pathing.
Especially for newer or entry-level millennial employees, it can be difficult to see how they fit into the company long-term. If you’re in charge of employee experience, make sure that you’re reminding managers to engage with employees at a “macro” level. At Paddle HR, we believe that managers should double as career coaches.
SEE ALSO: How Bad Managers Can Kill Your Employee’s Enthusiasm And Future At Your Company
Some easy ways of helping employees see how they fit in the long term:
Having genuine, one-on-one conversations with employees about the opportunities that are available to them the company
Showing them that their work matters by laddering it back to the company’s key objectives and vision
Developing a simple career pathing plan for them. This could include specific key results they want to hit in their current role, as well as the skills they need to become a better candidate for another role
Show that there are multiple pathways for career growth
In the past, the best way to recognize employee evolution and provide positive growth was mostly through a linear progression.
Hypothetically, if someone was a rockstar sales executive (an execution-heavy role), she would get promoted to being a sales manager (a soft-skill heavy role).
Promotion from individual contributor to manager is a natural, standard career growth path that works for some, but not everyone. For some, the skills that made them great at a particular task won’t necessarily mean they’ll be great at coaching others to do well in their former role.
They might decide that becoming a “manager” isn’t the right path for them. In fact, for many people, management is a bad career path.
Only one in ten managers currently in the role exhibit all the natural talents of a good manager. - Source, Gallup
Does that mean that 90% of your existing talent has a glass ceiling? Absolutely not! These employees have valuable skills and experiences that can be applied to other business units at the company.
Companies such as Google and HubSpot have invested heavily in the “individual contributor” career path. They have invested in opportunities for those other 90'%, who want to advance in their careers, but don’t want to become managers.
Not every large company can make headlines for their Silicon Valley inspired work conditions that attract modern talent in droves. Fortunately, that’s not what the modern worker is looking for, anyway.
“94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers.” - LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report
Becoming a place of work that people feel they can grow and develop is a big task. However, it’s increasingly clear that this is the best way to cultivate an effective workforce that’s committed long-term to your company.
The best workplaces retain their employees by showing them the career growth that the company can offer. Showing your employees that there’s a future with your company is as simple as letting them know where that future can be found.