Workforce
are routinely applying for many different jobs at once and you are being directly compared to your competitors during the recruitment process, so the candidate experience can be a deciding factor. The recruitment process must be
proactive and engaging, with multiple touch points (possibly as many as ten) with the candidate. Maintaining good lines of communication will ensure that the applicant feels valued, and you should use each touch point to showcase your organisation’s culture and values. The longer your recruitment process, the greater the risk of losing the candidate. Measuring ‘time to hire’ (the time from their first contact with you to their first day of work) is a good way to understand how efficient your process is and to start analysing where efficiencies and improvements can be made. Twenty to thirty days is good; under twenty days is very good. Good recruitment practices also play an important role in retention. Ensuring that you recruit people with the right values for working in care will minimise the risk of attrition and standing by these values, even when the job market is difficult, will pay dividends in the medium to long term. It is also a good idea to track how your longer-serving workers were recruited into the business to identify which recruitment sources generate the best retention rates. Employee referrals are often cited as being particularly effective in this regard.
2. First 90 days of employment During the first 90 days of employment, turnover rates are at their highest. A lot of investment goes into employees in this period but if they leave so soon you get little return. It is an anxious and unsettling time for new starters, so your team need to put a collective arm around them to help their transition.
The retention essentials during this period are (i) providing the necessary training and giving them the confidence to do their role, (ii) connecting them with colleagues and creating a sense of belonging, and (iii) evidencing your kind, caring, and high-performance culture. In practical terms this includes providing training and development, peer support (e.g. a buddy system), regular 1:1s, timely feedback, and gratitude for their work, as well introducing them to the wider team, ensuring that they receive a positive and friendly welcome from their colleagues, and
February 2023
www.thecarehomeenvironment.com
Providers report increasing numbers of care staff leaving the sector for financial reasons and securing better paid jobs in other sectors to make ends meet
guidance on internal systems (including how to book holidays, report absence, and access benefit schemes). These are all low cost and easy to implement but will make a significant difference.
3. Retention essentials Culture. Culture is the key to staff retention. The starting point is a clearly articulated purpose, vision and values which are implemented in practice and bespoke to your organisation. A common purpose will bind people together and your values should filter through every aspect of your business and create a culture where people want to work. Your culture will be set and driven by the leaders in the business. Poor leadership creates a poor culture and increases turnover rates, so it is essential that you have the right leaders, with the right skills, in place, and that you support them to develop their leadership skills (e.g. through leadership development programmes). HR management. Managers are key to retention because they are responsible for the day-to-day management of your people, and how they do that will determine the
10 top tips on staff retention
1 Recruit the right people with the right values
2 Offer a great employee experience during the recruitment and onboarding process
3 Create a caring, high performance, developmental and EDI focused culture
4 Focus on staff wellbeing 5 Think creatively about flexible working opportunities
6 Invest in people manager and leadership training for managers
7 Ensure proactive and fair management of HR issues
8 Create learning, development, and career opportunities
9 Collate retention data from staff surveys and exit interviews
10 Create an effective recruitment and retention strategy
workplace culture. Usually, managers are appointed
because they are good at care, but often they have not been supported to develop their people management skills, so it is important that you make this investment. These skills are critical to creating a positive workplace culture and an engaged and happy workforce.
Managing in a fair, transparent, consistent, and proactive way will help built trust, which is a key ingredient to retention. However, management issues are often not dealt with in this way and lead to staff losses that could have been avoided. Common examples are performance management and sickness absence management. Performance should be managed in
a proactive and positive way throughout employment, regularly coaching workers about the required standard and how to meet it. However, due to a lack of management time and misconceptions that performance management is a daunting and difficult process, performance is often not managed at all, or only managed late in the day when relationships have deteriorated, and when it is difficult to turn things around, often with the result that employment comes to an end. A failure to manage poor performance also has a negative impact on high performers who are left to pick up the slack, with the risk that they get fed up or burnt out and move on. Sickness absence needs to be managed in a proactive and compassionate way before it becomes long term. Often formal management is delayed by managers due to a misconceived perception that they are being sympathetic to the employee. However, delays are problematic for both the employee, who feels unsupported, and the business, and there is clear evidence that the longer someone is off the less likely they will ever return. At the four-week point, an occupational health report should be obtained so that you can understand the health issues and what reasonable adjustments can be made to facilitate a return to work and reduce further absences. Wellbeing. Wellbeing is such a critical issue in the sector given the demands of care work, the impact of the pandemic, and the current cost of living crisis. The mental health crisis in the sector has been
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