Top Reasons Your Best Talent Is Leaving You

You've worked hard to claw your business into its current position and undoubtedly, your workforce has helped your business get to where it is. You and your employees have reached a point where you are all cogs in a machine, working in synergy with each other. But what would happen if one of your star players were to leave? This scary situation for employers is unfortunately a reality as more workers are quitting their jobs today than at any point since 2010.

While there are definitely forces that are out of your control to stop your best people leaving, if you create an environment (and build relationships) that makes them feel challenged, engaged, valued, and rewarded you can raise the chances of retaining your top talent.

Here are the top reasons as to why your top talent are leaving:

1. Dissatisfaction with job or responsibilities

Great workers want to be learning and growing on the job. There is always room for growth and skill development, even if they are a seasoned pro. Increasing an individual's autonomy in their role can be a great way of giving them more responsibility while still getting all the work done.  

2.  Being unchallenged and dis-engaged them

Smart workers don’t want to feel like they are working in a repetitive role full of boredom. They need to have their minds engaged and their creativity challenged. An example of how you may engage someone in the workplace might be to allow them to shadow someone else from another part of the business for a day. 

3. Lack of a sense of belonging 

On a human level, everybody wants to feel liked and cared about, or at the very least like they belong somewhere. As an employee, they want to feel like you care not only about their career but also on a personal level. An aspect of Transformational Leadership is treating employees like individuals and not just another member of the team. The old saying of "leave your emotions at the door" is no longer valid. Employees who have fun with their colleagues and look forward to being at work are more likely to stay in the long term. Letting them feel like you care about them gives them the confidence to have a voice which may lead to innovations within your business and increased productivity!

4. A misalignment between personal leadership styles and the leadership style that is required to lead effectively.

It's hard to find a balance between micro managing and being a ghost in the workplace. Your best talent want to be given enough rope to accomplish their duties and tasks themselves. Similarly, being an absent or avoidant leader by only checking in with your staff once every few months will drive them away. It is essential to find the right balance between the two ends of the spectrum and a good way to assess how you are going is to simply ask your employees "Are we meeting enough for you to be as effective as you can be?".

As the saying goes: “Employees don’t quit working for companies, they quit working for their bosses”. It is clear that these small changes that you can immediately implement will pay off and prevent your top talent from needing to look for another job. 



To find out who your top talent is, our partners, Psych Press are talent assessment and development Psychologists. Psych Press have a large selection of in-house and customisable assessment tools that link personality to performance prediction for a variety of companies. One such tool, Business Personality Reflections (BPR) has been used for a multitude of roles to ascertain a strong fit for recruiting decisions. Based on a wide field of research and multiple industry norms, this assessment provides a full report for your informed decision. To find out more visit the Psych Press Business Personality Reflections page or contact them on (03) 9670 0590. 

Making engaging About Us pages that inspire action

A key reason why webmasters and business owners overlook the quality of an About Us page is because they feel it doesn’t relate to product enquiries or the exciting benefits and values that other product pages do. Neglecting the About Us page however, can do damage to product and conversion pages themselves. The main people who read your About Us page may be looking to build some understanding and trust before ‘taking the leap’ to buy or contact you, or they may simply want the feel of some human personality to know they’ve found something unique. Because of this, you need to make sure that you are doing what you can to stand out, represent, and invest your ideals into the readers mind in this space.

 

Give vital Information

What do you actually do? How do you do it? Finding this information is probably the reason why about 90% of your users are on the About Us page to begin with. Try not to delve deeply into impressive statistics or what your strong beliefs about your industry are before confirming with potentially high-end users that they’ve definitely come to the right place.

 

Get personality and benefit across clearly

When we discussed the importance of conveying a consistent feel and attitude across logo, brand name, headings and more, this also applies to the About Us page/s and can be achieved fairly simply.
Think about what personality is going to be consistent from introduction to giving information and to sale, and how that can be conveyed in your language. Are you a highly experienced firm that is proud of its achievements and has historical points of interest? Are you a fun and exciting gym that loves all of its members? Whatever your stance is, it needs to come across in your writing in such a way that your audience immediately picks up on the vibe and feels included. When they leave your About Us page to look at products or content, they should continue with the same mood you set them up with.

 

Be social

Does your business have a figurehead that is commonly involved in several aspects of customer interaction? Be sure to list them right at the top with a happy profile picture and description.
Are there also key staff members that make the business what it is? Be sure to list them and their positions as well. Some websites list their staff with descriptions a whole new web page in an effort to engage the idea that certain fields of services or outcomes are handled by very personal and professional experts.

 

Give proof where appropriate

Testimonials and success stories have several homes on most websites, and the About Us is a great place to list your best. Be sure to cover the scope of your key services and benefits, and don’t get stuck into the details - your user should be able to simply understand how their needs might relate.
Other helpful aspects to include are authentication and awards. Keep it short and sweet as you may need to update this regularly, and provide some simple imagery to get the point across. If you have some stand out strategic partnerships or previous users be sure to list them.

 

Use simple and effective design

Layout, colouring and design elements should allow users to begin and finish reading where you want them to in the most straightforward way possible. Although, this is easier said than done… here are some ideas that might help you out using the UK Coca-Cola About Us page as an example.

‘Introducing our business’ kicks your journey off with prestige, you don’t even have to click on the article to learn the big impressive numbers they want you to know.
‘Our Leadership Priorities’ gives an up to date nod to the company’s Corporate Responsibility, which does wonders for their public image and what you quickly learn about the brand’s personality.
After the big boxes about where the company came from, what they’re up to now and where they’d like to go is done, you have a mini-library of options to choose from and continue to become engaged with the business. And on the side of these pages is a constant ‘browse our brands’ option users notice that makes it all worthwhile!

 

Finally, think about your SEO, and links to more options

Hopefully after reading other Online Marketing Guides, this is already in the forefront of your brain whenever you’re making new webpages or testing out new marketing ideas. If there’s a logical path to calling you after an explanation of the team; add a link to ‘contact us’. If there’s a small spiel about the helpful information you give to your followers, share a link to subscribing or your social pages. Remember to make sure that your hyperlinks are smart and SEO primed.

 

Finding the mix of writing, design and SEO difficult?

Career Exchange can help allied health clinic websites to get back on track with engaging webpages so that you can increase your influx of natural interest. Our team has the design, writing and SEO marketing capacity to tackle almost any challenge and we are geared to the clientele challenges that allied health Australia face. To chat about what might be possible contact 03 9670 9590 or email info@careerexchange.com.au.

How to Make Engaging Content with Social Media

Engaging isn’t just about posting as many updates as possible then sitting back and waiting. You need to come back to your pages and help drive discussion. Find out what your audience is interested in, relate to your brand and consider how you can get them thinking and wanting to add their thoughts to the discussion. Being able to convert semi-interested users into followers and mini-ambassadors can have priceless long term results. We show you how to sow the seeds and how to avoid blockages.

From Beginning to Engaging

Be Up to date – Know your current events and interesting news updates related to your business. It’s good to show that you know the relevant news circulating within your client’s area of interest and that your input is solid. Be sure to post about news shortly after it has happened and when your users are most likely to be online. See Twitter trend search advice.

Open Ended – Try not to have the ‘be all and end all’ opinion or answer in a post. It’s fine to add some of your thoughts but avoid choosing sides or finishing off your own question otherwise you’ll leave no room for others to join in. Even something as simple as “Thoughts?” will work better than “do you agree or disagree with this?”

Humour – A great way to invite interest into what you’re posting is if you can be funny. By opening the door to comedians whilst still being relevant, you can potentially have an endless list of replies. As long as what you’re posting is seen to naturally come from your business it should fit in nicely.

Ask Questions – This isn’t just for inducing a response in general to give your pages purpose, but can give you some valuable information to use later. Things like “Did you pick up something nice from our sale?” or “What do you guys think of this new Xxxxxx on our site?” is very inviting to people who love to put their 2 cents in whilst being friendly at the same time. Remember though, not all your posts have to relate directly to your core business function.

Here is an example of an open question with an up to date news article.

Spotlight – This involves highlighting related achievements of your customers. Did someone take a picture of themselves at your workplace? Has someone completed some sort of challenge you laid out or won a competition? Be sure to post on how excited and glad you are that they did this, encourage the sharing and how happy you are to have them as a customer.

Simplicity – Be to the point. Around 80 characters is ideal. Balance out image use, links and occasional text only posts. Images get a lot more space in a user’s feed, but that isn’t an excuse to put in something irrelevant to the message you want to communicate.

 

Blockages to Engagement

Negativity – The need to avoid leading or allowing negativity can’t be stressed enough. A huge part of posting and also Community Management is keeping up a mood and attitude that represents your brand and the way you want people to respond. Don’t make complaints (even about competitors), don’t argue or highlight the wrongness of your audience. If it seems hard to avoid, think about what Mum always used to say; “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” :)

Ego – Never go into too much detail when posting anything about yourself on a company page. Remember, you’re representing your brand and that’s your starting point for getting people interested, replying and going where you want them to. Even if your company is named after a figurehead, that figurehead still represents a brand and a set of ideals not an individual.

Forcing – Don’t push people to join a conversation, if they’re not interested you need to leave it, learn from it and revise for next time. Repeating a similar idea or conversation in different spaces or times can work fine, but annoying people will do damage.

Overselling - You will lose people if you’re always trying to push products in their face without any tie to their values or drive to find out important information. Sharing promotions and points of interest is fine but make sure this is balanced out. 

Mundane Chatter – It might be ok to update with “Eating cereal” on your personal page but for a business this is a poor look and it doesn’t give people space to converse or use their imagination. Mix it up!

For HR and Small Business

For you, inviting ‘Spotlight’ activity will be a real winner. If you can entice people to share their experiences on your site or even have an ‘attendee of the week’ type of entry where people upload their own content things should grow smoothly. Apart from helping to create a fun and comfortable environment, this kind of sharing will be imperative for new users and visitors as using your service may be a fairly large decision for them and evidence from others can really help!