Retaining staff in a Competitive Environment

It does not really matter where you are based in the world, marketing is a very competitive industry. The fact that businesses can hire a marketer from other countries means that you are competing with literally thousands of other marketing firms for business. If you fail to deliver, you can lose work literally overnight.

You have to deliver, which means that you need good people working for you. Finding talented workers is not too hard given the popularity of marketing degrees, but retaining them is a big issue. The fact there is so much at stake means that someone with a good degree and plenty of experience can easily find another job.

For marketing firms staff retention is an ongoing challenge. You can read more about just how hard it is to keep good employees, in this sector, on this page.

Meeting the challenge

However, retaining staff is not impossible. By making staff redetection a key target for your business you can largely solve the problem.

Using software to help you

As with most problems, the key is identifying the issues and the solutions. Provided you are organised and follow through you can usually hang on to most of your best staff.

Investing in good HR software like the type that CascadeHR has developed can help a great deal with staff retention. Modern human resources software is about far more than payroll, and recruitment. It can be used to help you to manage your staff better, and make your work environment as stress free as possible.

An example

Let’s take absenteeism as an example. If you allow one or two members of staff to take Friday or Monday off sick on a regular basis you will soon have a problem on your hands.

What tends to happen is that other workers notice that their colleagues are enjoying long weekends at their expense. As a result, they start to feel taken advantage of, and that others are getting away with bad behaviour. When that happens, it is not long before they start to do the same thing. In no time, you can end up with an entire workforce that habitually takes unnecessary sick days.

Using a good quality HR package will allow you to spot potential bad habits at an early stage. It allows you to speak to the member of staff involved and find out what is going on. You can then take appropriate action, if necessary.

Keeping everyone working as a team, and sickness levels down are both important for productivity. Doing so also helps to keep stress levels to a minimum. When a team has to cover for a colleague who is sick, they have to work under pressure, which becomes stressful when it happens too often. Given the fact that the biggest reason people move jobs is stress, this is an important consideration.

Of course, managing absenteeism effectively is only one example of how HR software can help you to retain staff. There are several other ways using this type of software can benefit your business, but those are subjects for other articles.

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