How to retain your stellar employees even in a remote setting

5 pillars of success - from Monika Bajaj (Sr. Director of Engineering at Workday) & Praful Kaul - (VP of Engineering at Rally Health)

Post-pandemic many companies have moved to either fully remote or a hybrid work model (and many plan to stay like that). Recruiting and retaining employees is the key to success from a company’s growth perspective. While it’s not an easy task to keep all your employees happy and engaged, these 5 real-life techniques will keep your attrition lower than ever!

Don’t leave any stones unturned while hiring

The recruiting process is one aspect that you don’t want to discount if you wish to build long-lasting teams that give success. You must keep these 3 tips on top of your mind when hiring new team members.

• Keep a long-term perspective: Even if you do not have a complete vision of your future needs, start looking forward already. This will enable you to hire people who are creative, persuasive, and adaptable (to future change) along with their technical capabilities.
• Cultural fit makes a difference: When you go from 100 to 1,000, one of the key concerns is to keep the culture intact. Your interview process for new hires should be strong enough to assess if the candidate will be a good cultural fit.
• Interview process should be smooth: Be intentional in making the interview process smooth and a good experience for the candidates. First impressions last much longer than you may believe.

Ensure fair compensation for fair work

If you have different compensation and recruiting teams, have them work together. A good way to ensure fair compensation is to create different models based on geographical locations. Consider the location of your employees while preparing their package.

All your employees should be equally eligible for the same perks and equity options. We have all seen that people are productive working from a remote setup, so ensure that all your employees’ compensation stays uniform, whether onsite or remote.

Differentiate your compensation package

Of course, every company provides the best that they can to their people. Keeping in mind these few things will help you stay on top:

• Be aware of how you are competing with other companies in the compensation space.
• Stay up to date with the changing economy and regularly plan and adjust to the market.
• Don’t forget to share the updated compensation packages with hiring managers promptly.

Moving away from the finances, many other criteria hold importance for candidates while choosing to move or stay with an organization:

• A compelling mission and vision that the employees can feel passionate about
• A purpose in their work - something that creates an impact
• An Excellent company culture and like-minded co-workers

Convey your company culture

As difficult as it can be in a remote setting, aligning your existing and upcoming team members on the company culture can give you that edge over others. Building relationships over Zoom is not all easy, so you need to put a constant effort.

So whether you are a part of an enterprise or a start-up, the way you can bring across your culture is by storytelling. You need to weave:

• Your mission
• Your day-to-day work
• Your core values

All together. Another way to accomplish this is by putting as much content as possible online so that people can research, read and reflect on your company culture.

Keep your people engaged

In remote environments, people tend to be focused solely on work. So you need to support people in building great working relationships, albeit virtually. As people tend to be a little shy on virtual channels, so you need to put that extra effort and make communication more interesting and crisp. Apart from simulating the water-cooler discussions, these few techniques will help you keep your people engaged:

• Connect, connect & connect: The more your people connect over slack or other communication tools, the better connected they will feel with the rest of the organization.
• Acknowledge achievements: Celebrating success (however small) in a timely fashion and encouraging everyone to engage in others’ milestones.
• Provide growth opportunities: Many individuals are naturally good at seeking growth opportunities; at the same time, many are not. Help them identify what growth opportunities are good for them.
• Promote non-work-related conversations: Encourage people to come together and talk about things outside of their work (their pets, hobbies, or some latest tech. evolution).

The list of ways you can make your employees feel better is non-exhaustive. Be creative and think of ways to make their work and life happier, and they will stick around.