Small Effort, Big Significance: Tips to Boost Retention and Recruitment
Kristen Ireland and Erin Mies started People Spark 5 years ago with a consulting focus to boost a company’s bottom line by increasing profits and margin, increasing retention and engagement, and creating a culture of success. They aim to provide business leaders with simple, practical solutions.
At the 2023 ARA Conference and Expo, they will be presenting a session: “Stop letting your recruiting challenge create retention pain.”
“Especially over the last few years, we heard a lot from clients who were saying we're having a hard time having positions open and they can’t find people,” Ireland says. “Leaders were turning their attention externally focusing on how they fill these open positions and losing attention on the people that were there in their businesses–the employees who are showing up every day.”
Ireland says there was an obvious imbalance as the external focus created disengagement and created turnover losing people. That started a cycle of recruiting more, retaining less, and needing to recruit more. The team at People Spark are encouraging leaders to break that cycle by shifting their focus.
“We still need to find people for the roles that we have, and how do we make sure that we're continuing to focus on the people that are here for us every day, our current employees,” she says. “We want to keep them, retain them, engage them, so that we don't continue to have that retention pain.”
For additional tips and tools to engage and retain your teams and lead through change from People Spark, click here.
Mies adds the shift in focus is helping leaders recognize what is in their control.
“Leaders know their areas that are really special and set them apart from other retailers in the area. A lot of times, it isn’t what is shown in somebody's recruiting practices,” Mies says. “It’s helping leaders implement strategies and processes to create a thriving company culture where everyone has shared goals and is headed in the same direction.”
Highlighting aspects of your business in different ways brings in change, and the co-founders at People Spark are instructors at the collegiate level on change management.
“Were teaching future business leaders and HR professionals, all of the things that we wish we would have known 20 years ago,” Ireland says.
Mies encourages leaders to think about how they introduce change to avoid “change fatigue” or “change overload.”
“Our changes aren't going to be successful if we don't bring people along with us,” she says. “So we really focus on how will we bring people along because the change isn't whether or not you know as soon as you sign the paperwork or as soon as the system is implemented. The changes are successful when people are actually demonstrating the behaviors we want them to.”
The consultants offer two additional tips in leadership to improve retention:
- Have conversation starters ready and available to share for managers.
“It’s helpful to give the words to say, rather than instruct ‘go have an engagement discussion with them’ or ‘go make sure they know how much they're valued,’” Mies says. - Positive feedback is 1200x more effective than ignoring problems.
Ireland highlights Gallop data showing how negative feedback is 40x more effective in a team leadership approach than ignoring people. And positive feedback is 30x more effective than negative.
“It's 1200 times more effective in engagement to be positive, than walking by somebody,” she says. “And we are unintentionally walking by those moments every day. You can give somebody feedback in three sentences that will have a positive impact and create that engagement: small effort, big significance.”
The People Spark team has book coming out the week of conference: The People Spark: A Business Leader's Essential Guide to Crafting Your Culture with Confidence.
