Following on from our last post, “Recruitment strategies and the growing skills gap”, we asked our Director of People, Louise Foster about the specific strategies employers could utilise in order to reduce staff turnover.
Public services particularly are seeing high rates of staff turnover compared to pre-pandemic levels. This is, in part, due to the aging workforce and growing skills shortages, but leadership, financial pressures and work culture all have a significant part to play.
In this Q&A series, we sat down with Louise to discuss what steps businesses can take to retain talent in an evolving job market.
What specific strategies can employers implement to combat high staff turnover, particularly in frontline and critical service roles?
“Communication and strong leadership in any business is key; one of the main issues we experience is that contractors want to leave if they don’t have enough contact with their line manager.
Employees want to be heard, to have airtime with their managers. Most of these employees are incredibly passionate about what they do and are extremely skilled and talented at what they do, but when their leaders are rigid in their ways, unadaptable or unable to receive feedback or new ideas, it’s impossible to retain talent.
This is especially apparent in critical service roles; these employees have an element of hands-on experience with vulnerable people, it can be a high pressure environment and many of them are still working entirely remotely since the pandemic, so continual touch points, recognition, praise, and overall wellbeing support is crucial.
Equally, employees need to know when they’re doing a good job or not; that’s the airtime opportunity they need to be able to shift focus and learn and grow. We talk about the skills gap, but how would employers know they had one without the communication in the first instance?”
