When you find a great employee, you should keep them on board. Retaining employees can improve both productivity and the ability to attract new top talent.
However, you will need talent management strategies to retain your best talent. Remote talent management needs a different set of strategies than traditional workplace management.
Let’s explore some talent management tactics to help you keep your best remote talent to ensure your company meets its goals.
What Are Talent Management Strategies?
Talent management strategies are the steps you follow to motivate, attract, and retain your best employees. A good talent management strategy will help you increase employee retention and work productivity while upholding an ethical corporate culture. You can break the talent management model into four steps:
- Talent acquisition: Creating a positive employer brand identity
- Employee assessment: Following up on employees’ performance and helping them improve their skills.
- Employee development: Establishing workforce planning and a positive corporate culture.
- Talent deployment: Working with employees to achieve their goals in line with the organization’s objectives and providing them with development opportunities
These phases portray the process as a cycle driven by corporate objectives:
Your strategies, however, must be established based on a variety of elements, including the organization’s growth objectives, differentiated value, corresponding talent requirements, and so on. Here are some tips to keep in mind:
1. Be Flexible
Having flexible time is one of the best ways to ensure your employees work effectively without being pushed to meet deadlines. Find the right balance with your teammates by emphasizing the flexibility of work time, workplace, and technology you might use.
Make it possible for your workers to access adequate computing resources on their hardware and the cloud. Focus on deliverables and results instead of the employees’ physical presence. That means you will need to use different tools to check if your employees are on track.
Flexible workers are happy and more productive. If you allow your workforce to have the mobility they desire, their chances of sticking around and bringing more positive impact are high.
2. Check In Often
Your employees might be used to working in a physical location, and remote working might make them feel disconnected from the team. That’s why you need to check in on your employees often.
Virtual meetings allow you to have a one-on-one catch-up. They help you check on your team and teammates by holding daily stand-ups, one-on-one meetings, or conference calls, all of which are made possible by a business VoIP service or other communication solution. Additionally, these catch-up sessions will give you an upper hand in tracking the team’s performance in a working environment while ensuring workplace communication.
But that is not all. When you check on employees often, you can get honest feedback on how things are working for them. You also can get to better know their skills and ambitions. In addition, you will be able to develop actionable talent management strategies such as contract renewals and improving connections with top employees.
3. Establish Clear Goals
Setting defined goals for your staff establishes clear expectations. You must define success criteria. When communicating with your talent, you should explain the objectives of each assignment.
For example, instead of generalizing the role of maintaining client relationships with your account executive, you might specify that you need them to nurture strategic relationships with key clients to reduce competitive risks. You will automatically motivate qualified employees to stay by outlining all of this information.
Also, you can set clear and precise goals for your organization by giving employees a clear output requirement and job description. Avoid using buzzwords that could end up confusing your team. Instead, use simple, direct language and include crucial information.
You also should do periodic assessments and set yearly key performance indicators (KPIs). This is a method of evaluating performance according to the competencies required by the company. It motivates, engages, and keeps your best performers, causing them to consistently improve their performance and get valuable insights into possible areas for development.
Creating goals and communicating them to the employee from the beginning of the contract gives them a clear picture of your expectations.
4. Offer Training
One of the most significant factors that boost employee retention is how well your organization supports the career development of your talent. While compensation and benefits play a role in employee retention, an employee worth keeping will seek new opportunities to learn and apply those skills to their job.
Large businesses typically have a dedicated Learning and Development (L&D) department that provides soft skills training to their employees. On the other hand, a small business might not have enough employees to justify maintaining an L&D team. Instead, they can partner with an external vendor for tailored training courses:
If you provide a window for learning opportunities, you can retain your best talent and reap the benefits of upskilling your workforce. These benefits include filling skills gaps in your firm, saving money, improving your workers’ productivity, and ensuring that someone is ready to step up into higher positions when needed.
5. Focus on Employee Wellness
Given that we spend close to 60 percent of our active hours at work, things that happen at the workplace—even remote ones—considerably affect an employee’s overall life. Maintaining one’s health requires a correct work-life balance.
Your workers’ work-life requirements and desires vary according to their personalities and job expectations, so you must take a personalized approach to employee wellness. At the team level, you need to address their concerns regarding job stability, lack of promotion opportunities, poor relationships with coworkers, and so on.
Evolving Strategies
It’s no secret that more people today are working remotely more than ever before. In response, management methods should evolve accordingly.
Effective talent management strategies are vital, so find a balance between micromanagement and being a good manager, be flexible, check in regularly, offer upskilling opportunities, keep your focus on employee wellness, and establish clear goals.
These steps will help you create a remote management strategy that retains your employees and simultaneously keeps them engaged and happy.
