Employee Retention In Times Of Crisis – What You Can Do Now

Qualified employees are a company’s most important resource. Maintaining this permanently ensures your long-term corporate success. The importance of employee loyalty is given even greater weight in times of crisis like this. Because according to current surveys, every second employee feels affected by the Corona crisis. As a result, it is now important for the management – in conjunction with the HR department – to respond to the needs and uncertainties of your employees.

The feeling of appreciation should not be neglected either, even if everyday business life has become more stressful and complex. A clear communication strategy and effective crisis management provide orientation and security. In times of crisis, these are qualities that can pave the way for the time after the crisis, when you certainly want your best employees on board.

With this blog article, we would like to sensitize you to this important topic and provide recommendations for action and measures to strengthen your employee loyalty in times of Corona.

Rethink Your Corporate Culture

Does your existing corporate culture continue to promote the loyalty and well-being of your employees? Which corporate values ​​should your employees identify with? What should your company stand for and remain attractive for existing and new employees in the future?

Like any product strategy, business goals or personal plans, you also have your corporate culture recurring to the test set and adjust if necessary.

Especially in times of crisis, when business development and the well-being of the workforce fluctuate considerably. For example, in the times of Corona, many companies decided to part with a pure presence culture. Since then, these companies have increasingly been using flexible working models and offering technical requirements for home office workplaces.

Transparency As A Means Of Success

One of the most important building blocks of your revised corporate culture is a transparent communication strategy. Continuous and open dialogue with your employees generates appreciation, ideas and further development. Because it has been scientifically proven that when employees feel valued, they identify more strongly with their company, are more satisfied and ultimately perform better. Ultimately, stronger employee loyalty leads to creative and productive work, which is extremely important for overcoming challenges in times of crisis.

Here move employees and their data into the centre of this strategy. In the age of digitization, affordable HR tools are available that you and your employees can use to record, manage and evaluate personal data. For example, you should digitize your employee appraisals. This is because employee dialogues can be recorded in a standardized manner. Their results are available to all relevant colleagues via an employee self-service platform (e.g. an employee portal). In this way, you drive employee development even in times of crisis and do something for your strategic employee loyalty.

Employee Retention Is A Matter Of Leadership

Like many entrepreneurial aspects, employee loyalty also begins at the management level.

Because this sets the course, for example, the paradigm shift in the working world due to the home office or the internal communication of upcoming short-time work. When management exudes transparency, optimism, and sustainability in their communication, this positively impacts the workforce. One way to live this out, especially in times of crisis and to strengthen employee loyalty, is, for example, to make short daily calls together.

Such measures give everyone involved planning security and orientation. Intuitive collaboration tools support you in this. On top of that, modern HR solutions promote an open, objective and transparent corporate culture through innovative functions. Thus, executives rely on their gut feeling and have evaluable facts about their employees. Intuitive functions and digitized processes in employee appraisals, personnel development, target agreements or individual evaluations are just a few examples that we will briefly mention here.

Applicant Management – The Beginning Of Employee Retention

Strategic employee loyalty also begins in times of crisis with the design of your application processes. Because this is where the foundation for a long-term partnership between employees and the company is laid. As a result, you need applicant management software in your HR department that provides you with active support in process design and creating suitable candidate profiles.

Ultimately, applicants must fit your company based on their skills, career, competencies, soft skills and other data. Accordingly, such a recruiting system helps you store candidate profiles based on your desired data and skills. But also to identify and compare suitable applicants and to evaluate their data.

From The Career Portal To Onboarding – Show Yourself From Your Best Side

The first impression the candidate receives of your company also plays an important role in their decision. From your career portal on your website to applicant contact and the final (online) interview, you have the opportunity to make applicants aware of your corporate culture and values. Because, like you, most candidates are interested in a long-term professional partnership in which they feel comfortable, are understood and recognized.

Have you already made the application process for your candidates simple and intuitive? Do you keep your candidates up to date during the application process, or do they run the risk of feeling “forgotten”? Onboarding or training is just as important for successful employee loyalty.

Has an onboarding concept been defined in your HR department? If so, do you still manage your onboarding to-do lists manually?

Modern HR software solutions help you completely digitize your on- and off-boarding processes and automate them for everyone involved. All of this results from the fact that the new employee has fun working from day one, which ultimately makes employee retention much easier for you.

Develop A Feedback Culture

We have already talked about the benefits of open, transparent communication above.

The next logical step is to underline these direct communication channels with a strong feedback culture. How do your employees feel, especially during the Corona crisis? What is still going well, what can be improved? You can only react to problems that arise early if you continuously ask employees for their personal opinion and assessment.

In this way, you prevent dissatisfaction. You also convey a strong feeling of interest and appreciation to your employees. This approach will promote your employee loyalty, especially in times of crisis. A paper-based feedback culture to keep alive and further develop today is hardly feasible. It would help if you had digital tools, for example, to easily create employee questionnaires, to share them quickly and to be able to evaluate them continuously.

This is the only way for you and your employees to develop the feedback processes in the company in a sustainable and promising way. Here one is HR software, and a built-in digital personnel file facilitates your everyday work and a positive impression among your employees.

In addition, both your employees and your HR department save the administrative effort of such personnel questionnaires.

Promote Employee Development Through Targeted Measures

In addition to regular, constructive feedback, it is important to promote development measures in your workforce. Especially based on the interviewed personnel questionnaires and employee interviews, further training measures and target agreements often result. Therefore, it is important to digitally log, manage, and evaluate the questionnaires and employee interviews. In this way, structured measures can be developed that sustainably promote your employees.

You can also map measures such as bonus payments using personnel management software. You then automatically transmit this data to your payroll software.

Also Read: HR Trends: How Hiring Strategies Are Being Shaped By Technology