How to Lower Your Technical Team’s Turnover
The technical and engineering industry is candidate driven, with fierce competition between employers to attract and recruit the best talent to their teams. Being such a highly skilled sector, hiring the right people is by no means a straightforward task.
The technical industry is highly competitive, and a salary is no longer enough to keep someone from leaving. With one of the highest employee turnovers of any industry, retaining technical teams is no mean feat.
To help you keep your staff happy, engaged, and motivated in a bid to reduce your technical team’s turnover, consider implementing the following tips.
Offer Flexible Working
Following Covid-19, most employees have become accustomed to working from home, including those in the technical and engineering sectors. Many people cite increased levels of productivity and a better work/life balance as reasons for wanting to continue working from home, so much so that up to 50% of employees have admitted that they would quit their job if flexible working hours weren’t an option.
Giving your technical team the opportunity to work from home can have a big influence on your employee retention rates, so if you’ve noticed a higher turnover since lockdown restrictions ended, flexible working could be something for you to look at.
Provide Clear Career Progression Routes
Career progression cannot be emphasized enough when it comes to lowering employee turnover, with many studies and reports citing it as the number one reason people leave their jobs. This means you should be prioritising setting out clear career paths for your team to follow. When there are no opportunities for growth or development, there is little to motivate employees to stay because they have nowhere else to go beyond their current position.
With this in mind, make investing in your staff and their careers a priority if you want to improve employment retention rates.
Give Them the Best Tools
Engineers are amongst the most highly skilled in the workforce, but in order for them to perform at their best, they need the correct tools. Outdated equipment or lack of resources can make simplistic jobs 10x harder than they need to be, and this can cause unnecessary stress and prevent your team from doing their tasks. Ease frustrations and equip them with the materials to succeed.
Provide a Structured Onboarding Process
Onboarding directly correlates to staff turnover. Companies who invest in a comprehensive onboarding process experience an 82% increase in the retention of their new hires compared to those who don’t. What’s more, productivity is also increased by up to 70%.
From an employee’s perspective, the onboarding process gives them their first impression of a company, and it can set the tone for the culture of the business. If new hires are left with a sour taste in their mouth after their onboarding, they are less likely to stay. Compare that to positive onboarding experience leading to employees staying with the company for at least three years, it’s clear to see how big of an impact onboarding can have on your technical team.
Have Regular Review Meetings
We’ve already mentioned how positive reinforcement can have a huge impact on staff retention, but that extends further than rewards and benefits. Make sure your technical team feel appreciated and valued and allow them to air any concerns by holding regular review meetings.
Talk to BMS Performance
BMS Performance are specialists in engineering recruitment and can help you find the most appropriate candidates to fill vacant positions. Please contact us if you have any further questions about employee retention, and to discuss hiring the very best technical talent to your team.