Running your organization efficiently means paying attention to your bottom line. Going over budget simply isn’t an option. Because of this focus on finances, it’s easy to let less tangible metrics like employee engagement fall to the wayside.
Wait!
First, employee engagement is much more important than you may realize. Second, the same solution that boosts employee engagement has also been proven to help you cut costs. We’re talking about regular, well-done performance reviews. Let’s dig a bit deeper to learn how these reviews foster the personal connections your staff members desire, as well as help you stick to a budget.
You don’t want mindless drones; you want team members who are engaged, empowered, and actively participating in making the workplace better. When employees have an opportunity to engage with their manager they feel empowered. In turn, this makes them more likely to develop a deeper emotional bond with the company and their work. The end result is higher engagement and better performance.
Direct feedback is a powerful driver of this type of desired engagement, not only for those who give the feedback, but also for those who receive it. A one-on-one conversation between an employee and their boss ultimately opens up new growth, challenges, and opportunities to get excited about their work. A great way to do this is through performance reviews.
Performance reviews are your chance to provide strategic vision, establish organization-wide goals, clarify team objectives, set up expectations, and help your individual employees improve. Your team members learn what their key strengths are and where they should focus their development efforts. These conversations are a time for training and coaching. During their performance review, ask your employee questions and listen to them. The best approach to find out what each of your employees need and want in order to do their best is to simply ask them!
Remember, the reviews aren’t just you talking at them; they’re a conversation. Employee reviews are a way to gauge interest and engagement, and to ensure any grievances about the current work environment are heard. Ultimately, they go a long way towards improving your employee retention numbers (more on this in a minute).
A performance review is a way to speak candidly and personally with each member of your team, sparking a personal connection that makes employees more engaged, happy, and likely to stay employed with your organization. Speaking of this, Deloitte found quite a few things that may interest you. Companies that conduct effective performance reviews are:
Pay close attention to that third metric. What do performance reviews have to do with financial targets? An engaged team is a team that works collaboratively, solves problems together, is happier, and more productive. More-engaged team members are happy – happy enough to stay at your organization for years to come. The opposite side of this equation is poor retention and the associated costs of replacing your employees. Gallup reports that, "the cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee's annual salary." That will add up quickly.
You want to keep your team intact for as long as possible. A high employee turnover rate is a killer to morale and productivity. A brand new employee will not be able to be as quick, efficient, skilled, and handle problems that arise the way a seasoned team member is able to. For this reason, an engaged team is better for everyone, including you.
Gallup also found that employees who aren’t engaged are more than twice as likely to leave.
Let’s take a moment to look at a realistic example of what it costs to replace an employee. Let’s say Grant is a manager at a university and his department is staffed with student employees. If his student employee at the university book store makes $6,000 a year, it would cost at least $3,000 to replace him or her. These costs are found in placing ads, running background checks, processing paperwork, Human Resources going over resumes, Grant handling interviews, and paying other team members to train new hires. This is all money that wouldn’t have had to be spent if an employee was happy enough to stay on board in Grant’s department.
Now let’s expand it a little further. How many new hires does he need this semester? If Grant needs to hire 10 new bookstore employees after 10 quit within the past few months, that’s $30,000 of wasted money (not to mention time and effort) that could have been avoided if his employees were happier.
That’s the concerning news. The good news is that SubItUp has an easy way for you to give the performance reviews that stop this from happening. Our platform builds employee reviews for you, aggregating staff performance data like:
Our system enables you to not only provide constructive feedback to your staff, but also directly schedule a time to meet with the employee based on their work schedule. Once the employee review is complete, it is saved to the employee profile so managers with proper permissions can access it. This way, you will always have a sense of that employee's performance and growth track.
This is only the beginning of how we make managers happier and help them save more time. We’d love the opportunity to show you exactly how our software can transform the way your department manages your team. Contact us today for a consultation to learn more about what we can do for you. This 10-minute conversation is a casual way for us to get to know one another better. Fostering better performance reviews is only one way we can help you keep labor costs down. Be sure to ask how the University of South Carolina has saved over 1.5 million dollars by implementing SubitUp!