We may or may not be in a recession right now, or were in one earlier this year, or may still be headed for one – but one thing is certain and that is the economy is struggling. This means your employees are too.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that during tough economic times, your employees will stay put. Surely, when money is tight and the future is uncertain, people won’t willingly leave a steady job. It is only reasonable to hold onto a good, stable job to get through this phase… right?
In fact, this isn’t accurate. Fortune tells us that employees still have plenty of options during economic downturns, and aren’t afraid of being choosy. Even with a recession looming, many workers aren’t afraid to leave their job for a better one. When predictions of an economic downturn first started popping up a while back, some business leaders thought that workers' leverage in a tight labor market would end. This hasn’t been the case. Let’s look closer at why retaining and delighting your existing employees, especially during tough economic times, is so important to your organization.
Recruiting and Hiring Is Expensive
During a recession, more than any other time, you don’t want to risk losing your best team members. After all, recruiting and hiring is expensive! According to new benchmarking data from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the average cost per hire was nearly $4,700. That already sounds like a lot, yet many employers estimate the total cost to hire a new employee can be three to four times the position's salary, according to the same article. That means if you're hiring for a job that pays $40,000, you may spend $120,000 or more to fill that role.
Of those costs, approximately 30-40% are so-called “hard costs,” and the other ~60% are “soft costs". Soft costs include the time departmental leaders and managers invest in supporting the HR-specific roles of the hiring process, running background checks, processing paperwork, Human Resources going over resumes, the manager handling interviews, and paying other team members to train new hires all reflect money spent by an organization. When these are added to the hard costs, such as running paid ads to promote the job opening, the price of recruiting continues to climb! Clearly, it’s very important to your bottom line to keep your team members in place for the long haul.
Keeping Your Employees Happy and Engaged Via SubItUp
You can’t simply hope your team members will stay employed at your organization. You can, and should, take the necessary steps to make it happen. You will go a long way towards keeping your best employees by making them happy at work, and can so do by:
Creating a Schedule That Is Always Right
Many organizations need to schedule employees for shift work. The scheduling process for these departments can get complicated and it isn’t always perfect on the first try, especially if a manager is creating it by hand in an Excel document. More often than not, these schedules need to be pulled offline to be fixed. This may not seem like a problem, but it can quickly become an expensive endeavor and also leads to an increasingly unhappy staff.
Perhaps the most catastrophic result of the scheduling conflicts that come from manual scheduling concerns employee absenteeism. Chronic absenteeism leads to lowered productivity, increased labor costs in the form of overtime (OT), and employee burnout. Any unaccounted for, additional shifts that put some people well above 40 hours lead to OT pay of time and a half and an employee who’s pretty tired. This boom in labor cost likely wasn’t planned for in the budget. On top of that, a burnt out employee is more likely to not give it their all at work. This can surface in the form of showing up late or not at all, giving the customers a less-than-ideal experience, and causing quite a few headaches for the manager.
So how do you ensure you’re keeping your employees happy and engaged? The solution is the AI-powered scheduling software from SubItUp. Not only are schedules going to be correct the first time, but they will also be done significantly easier and in a less time-consuming manner than the methods of the past. This means employees are happier, labor costs are reduced, and no one is fed up enough to quit.
Offering Direct Communication in the Form of Employee Reviews
Everyone needs direct feedback from their superiors, and an employee review provides this opportunity. An employee review is when a manager and an employee meet to discuss the employee's performance. These are commonly held either quarterly or annually. As a manager, this is your chance to provide strategic vision, establish organization-wide goals, clarify team objectives, set expectations, and help your individual employees improve. In these one-on-one meetings, employees learn what their strengths are and what they should focus on in order to improve. Employee reviews work to boost morale, increase retention, as well as simply make your organization a better place to work.
When you use SubItUp for your employee reviews, you can clearly and easily see the team member’s pertinent data, including:
- Punctuality
- Number of Shifts They’re Scheduled for
- Number of Shifts They Pick Up for Others
- Their earnings
This makes for more engaged-team members, and more-engaged team members are happier than those who don’t feel they’re getting individualized attention. In fact, Deloitte found that companies who conduct effective performance reviews are:
- 30% more likely to meet their financial target
- 370% more likely to address workforce development needs
- 270% more likely to have an engaged workforce
Ensuring Their Pay Is Keeping up with Inflation
With a possible 2023 recession looming, it is likely that many employers will freeze their payrolls and deny raises, as is typical with every other downturn or recession. Just remember to be careful before doing this without thinking of the long-term consequences. At the end of the day, even a happy employee will still need to seek opportunities elsewhere if they can’t pay their bills.
One of the possible advantages of your team members ending their current employment and finding a new job is the possibility for increased pay. As of 2021, there was a 5.8% average salary increase when employees switched jobs. This means you shouldn’t simply take raises and bonuses off the table and assume your team members can’t do anything about it. They can; they can quit.
There are a variety of ways SubItUp’s software allows you to cut costs. Savvy managers know how crucial it is to pass the extra funds on to their team. Our AI-enabled scheduling software makes it possible to stay within the payroll budget and not go into expensive OT costs, so you can have the extra funds to award worthy raises. When you have wiggle room in the budget to pay your team more, you won’t need to worry about them leaving to ensure they can keep up with rising costs.
Partner With SubItUp to Make it Happen
If you make the three concepts above a focus at your organization or within your department, this effort will go a long way in ensuring your best team members stay with you for a long time. If you’re interested in learning more about what our employee management solutions are and what positive changes can be brought to your organization through our software, click the button below. Say goodbye to high turnover rates and ever higher disengagement, and say hello to an employee management software that ensures your team members stay put for many years to come!
