How Work Management Tools Can Improve Employee Recruitment and Retention
Discover strategies that can help make the most of your hiring initiatives
August 12, 2022
The past year has been a particularly tumultuous one in the job market, with record turnover across all industries. A Pew Research Center survey of American workers found that the top reasons for leaving jobs last year were for a better salary, more opportunities for promotion, and positions where they felt respected.
This Great Resignation has continued into 2022, as people search for jobs that better meet their expectations and match their priorities. If your company is looking to hire in this climate, you need to ensure you’re recruiting employees who are a good fit while also providing them with a work environment that encourages them to stay. We’ll outline some strategies that can help make the most of your hiring initiatives, including:
- Knowing who you are as a company
- Prioritizing a positive employee experience
- Embracing feedback and change
Company Mission, Values, Culture
Company Culture consists of the overall mission and shared values that define your brand and help connect your employees to both the what and the why of the work that they’re doing. In addition to internal policies, your mission and values should be clear in all your public-facing materials. The content that your brand posts on social media, website design, and even job listings should reflect company culture in both the written material and the visuals.
Because the Swit platform is built to provide context, you’re supported throughout the process of developing these materials. You can have a conversation about company values for a social media post or website update in a chat channel and then convert one or more messages to a task, bringing all relevant information along with them. Cross-workspace communication is also a great way to pool resources from multiple departments for a larger project.
It’s important for you to take an active interest in how your brand is perceived online, not only in relation to customers but also your hiring strategies. Potential employees will research your company before deciding to take a job, so it’s important you know what they’ll find when they do. Swit can assist you with regular monitoring of mentions on social media by connecting spreadsheets with tasks through our Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace integrations. This helps connect the data you collect with relevant action items, such as public opinion analysis or content production.
In order to improve employee retention, you should also work to make sure current employees feel connected to the company mission. Having an organized onboarding process gives people a clear understanding of their job responsibilities and also provides the team with opportunities to bond both in person and in a remote environment. The customizable profile settings in Swit are a great way to get to know people by creating space for them to list pronouns, portfolio links, pet names, or even favorite restaurants! And since the platform is built to support asynchronous work, you’re able to provide employees with the flexibility necessary for work-life balance.
Positive Employee Experience
Employee engagement is one way to measure how connected employees are to their work. It’s a key factor in measuring the overall employee experience, especially in knowing how well workers feel their personal goals align with the goals of the company. It’s important for every company to have a strategy for both improving and maintaining employee engagement, with the right software at the core to ensure consistent implementation.
There is a clear connection between high employee engagement and success for a business. When employees are passionate about their work they feel a sense of pride in what they are doing, leading to higher job satisfaction and better mental and physical health. The byproduct of this is that employees are more productive and likely to produce higher quality work. As an added benefit for the company, an environment with high employee engagement has better employee retention, improved customer service, and the potential for improving your overall brand image.
On the flip side, there are serious consequences to a lack of employee engagement in your workplace. According to a recent Gallup survey, 48% of currently employed workers are either in the process of looking for a different job or keeping an eye on listings for new opportunities. The pandemic has posed unique challenges to maintaining employee engagement, with many people citing a loss of connection to their coworkers, heightened anxiety, and an increased need for flexibility among the reasons they are seeking a change. This increased turnover rate impacts the business in lost time for training replacement staff, and your company’s output inevitably suffers due to communication breakdowns.
In another survey, 69% of employees said that offering a hybrid option is an indicator that a company cares about their overall well-being. Transitioning to a hybrid model can offer more flexibility, but in order to keep employees both satisfied and productive you need to make this move thoughtfully and deliberately. Employee autonomy is key in making sure a remote or hybrid structure works for everyone. By including team chat, project management, and critical integrations in one front-end hub, Swit combines all the essential collaboration functions that your team needs — regardless of their location.
Digital Employee Experience
Digital Employee Experience is a term that describes how workers interact with software, apps, and other digital tools. A well-orchestrated Digital Employee Experience ensures that employees are able to function just as productively remotely as they do in the office, allowing for flexibility in the work environment.
As the comfort level with these digital tools increases, support ticket requests for the IT department decrease, freeing up their time to focus on more innovative projects. With the Swit Chatbot, you’re able to program the answers to frequently asked questions into your Workspace, automating otherwise tedious processes and freeing up knowledge workers for more valuable and engaging tasks.
In the current job market, the majority of employees expect a company to accommodate a variable schedule in order to help balance their personal needs, and the Digital Employee Experience is an important factor in their decision to accept or keep a position. By integrating both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 into the Swit app, it offers a seamless experience for employees to have everything they need easily accessible.
There is a lot of competition to recruit and retain skilled workers, so if you don’t provide employees with the right tools you run the risk of losing them to competitors that offer a better experience.
Embrace Feedback and Change
Don’t wait until employees leave to find out what is important to them — an exit interview is too late to make meaningful changes in your company policies and culture. Promote open dialogue and encourage people to offer constructive criticism on every aspect of the business.
We are Re:Humanizing within our own company by creating chat channels dedicated to suggestions for employee benefits and programs for peer recognition. We are also able to share and collect employee job feedback forms through our integrations that give us better insight into company operations at every level on a regular basis.
When you operate using a remote or hybrid model, you’re able to take advantage of all the opportunities that a distributed workforce can offer your business. You have access to a more diverse pool of candidates, and can better prioritize alignment with the company mission and values as part of the hiring process because you’re not restricted by a physical location. By implementing a front-end hub like Swit, every employee is empowered to work effectively and efficiently regardless of location.
The right technology is essential if you want to recruit and retain top talent. Contact us to learn more about how Swit’s work management solutions can benefit your hiring strategy.
Natalie Litofsky, Managing Editor
