Once you’ve recruited staff who fill skills gaps in your company, you need to consider how you will keep those workers. These days, people have various work options at their disposal, due to the rise of the gig economy. Your staff might not necessarily need you more than you need them.
The bottom line is: you must look after your workers. How can you do this if pay raises or promotions are out of the question? Consider these alternative methods for keeping your staffers content.
Solicit feedback from your employees
What do they want? It’s a simple question, but you might not be putting it to them as often as you should. After all, if you often seek feedback from customers, why not request feedback from employees, too?
Don’t worry about the prospect of staff suddenly clamoring for more pay; your intention is simply to understand your staff’s goals, not act on requests. It’s worth heeding Forbes contributor H. V. MacArthur’s point that “pay and promotion aren’t the only carrots you have as a manager.”
Reduce your own salary and raise your employees’ pay
Hold on, didn’t we just acknowledge that increasing your staff’s pay might not be an option? In typical circumstances, it might not be. However, if you slash your own salary at the same time, you could balance the books.
One person who has done exactly that is Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price, who has announced his intention to hike the minimum employee salary at his Seattle-based tech company up to $70,000.
Run the company like a small one, even if it isn’t
When you last online-purchased a ticket for an event, you probably did so through Eventbrite, a company responsible for having generated ticket sales to the tune of over $3 billion globally.
Though the employee count at Eventbrite is over 500, company co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz has credited a “small company” mentality with helping to keep her workers happy, FE International founder Thomas Smale wrote for Entrepreneur.
Her workplace strategies include holding weekly question-and-answer sessions called Hearts to Hertz, allowing flexible work hours and internally surveying employees.
Give childcare vouchers to hardworking parent employees
Your staff members who have small children could particularly struggle with balancing their work and life responsibilities. For this reason, these staffers could appreciate being handed childcare vouchers for discounted prices of nurseries, crèches and more.
Bytestart.co.uk notes that, typically, such staff are still required to hit particular performance targets or milestones within the business to become eligible for these vouchers.
Implement wellbeing schemes and initiatives
You’re probably not just imagining all of those Fitbits you keep seeing on employees’ wrists in the office. Interest in health and wellbeing has gained momentum in 2019, but how can you encourage your staff to work on both their physical and mental health?
A software-based scheme from a company like LifeWorks, a purveyor of workplace welfare solutions, could be just what you need… and, more to the point, what your workers need.
