Employee retention has become a pertinent problem for many companies in the Asia Pacific. According to a survey finding from PwC Global, only 57% of employees in APAC are satisfied with their jobs and at least one in five desires to switch to a new employer.
Changes in workplace expectations and possible manpower restructures are escalating due to imminent global inflation. Coupled with uncertainties and disruptions of the pandemic over the past 2 years, many people are spurred to reflect on how they are treated at work, re-evaluate their priorities, and eventually quit their jobs in pursuit of a better quality of life.
Ongoing trends of the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting are already in full swing and have become obvious manifestations of global workforce discontent.
These trends raise an essential question – How can employers then ensure employee happiness, prevent further disengagement, and foster positive employee experience and retention rate?
But, before that first understand what is employee experience and why it is important.
What is Employee Experience?
Employee Experience is a holistic combination of all the interactions an employee experiences during its journey with an organization – from recruitment to onboarding and career development, to exiting the organization. These interactions include people, systems, policies and workspaces.
| | Employee experience includes everything – how an employee feels, how they perceive their potential and abilities, and the effect on their well-being. |
Employee experience is a pivotal factor that significantly impacts employee satisfaction and is very crucial throughout the entire employee journey. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, everything about employee experience has fundamentally changed versus earlier times. Employee expectations and so do their priorities have shifted.
Chris Lui, Director – Corporate Services Recruitment Team at Cornerstone Global Partners Singapore, shares best practices to help you deliver a positive employee experience as well as optimize retention rate.
Advocate Employee Wellness and Invest in Employee Growth
The aftermath of the pandemic has taken a significant toll on both the physical and mental well-being of the workforces, hence supporting employee well-being by talking to them and gathering feedback is the biggest way to prevent disengagement and improve the employee experience.
Offering merely a hybrid remote work environment should not be the sole solution, but genuinely checking in on teams to gauge their overall happiness towards work and aligning their career paths go a much longer way, providing a sense of fulfilment and meaning.
Encourage to Have Authentic and Heart-to-Heart Engagements
Employees need to be able to trust their managers, which also requires employer transparency. Traditional hierarchical structures and top-down, command-and-control approaches may not work anymore and may further create a transparency gap.
Employees want to feel empowered and secure in what they do and how they are being invested in their growth within the company, hence a heart-led leader that displays traits of empathy, vulnerability, and humility demonstrates tenacity and credibility to their employees, and will stand out during turbulent times at work.
Offer Fair and Competitive Compensation
…but not as the sole factor to retain talent
Manpower restructures post-pandemic have led to increasingly heavy workloads as employees are putting in even more hours than before, inspite of remote work privileges. It is therefore important to re-assess employee wages based on industry standards to prevent them from looking at greener pastures.
However, hasty reliance on compensation counter-offers to retain talent attempting to move on with no basis towards their work productivities is clearly unsustainable and may create a wrong signal to employees where they feel a shift of power in their favour to ask for unrealistic remuneration demands beyond their actual work capabilities.
Hence, employees must be clear and transparent about the pay structure and employers should increase bonuses and their wages only when employees have demonstrated that their value is truly deserving of it.
In fact, offering skill specialization through specialist training or adding motivators to existing roles through increasing autonomy and task variety are more often than not better alternatives to increase job satisfaction and retention for the employee.
At the end…
Employee retention will always be a constant concern for many companies, but the main key strategy for employee retention is to always make sure that employees are heard, and feel appreciated. Whether it is financial incentives, education and skill enhancement growth opportunities, or well-being benefits, feeling valued at the workplace fosters a sense of fulfilment and resilience, despite a volatile economic landscape today.
At CGP, we have a comprehensive line of HR solutions that meet the needs of companies with distributed teams, including talent search, executive search, and contracting. Learn more about how we can help you bring great talents together across Asia.
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