It should never be the case that you wait for someone to threaten to leave before you decide just how important they are!
Here’s a made-up case study to illustrate the point.
Meet Samantha. She’s a good Internal Communications Manager, earning £50k. She’s emotionally invested in the organisation, performs well, and has some growth potential. If you were to give Samantha an overall score out of ten, it would be an eight.
Like everyone, she’d like a bit more money, especially as she has two kids, and wouldn’t mind undertaking the Institute of Internal Communications Masters in IC, costing £6k.
But there’s no real budget for bespoke L&D courses and double the cost of the living wage increase is as high as any salary increase would go.
So, Samantha gets on LinkedIn, finds a job similar to the one she already has, gets paid £10k more, and will consider self-funding the Masters if her new employer won’t pay.
Her original organisation then looks to recruit at the same salary—perhaps even lower—which would score a few budget brownie points. After a three-month search, which overstretches the remaining IC team members as they’re a person short, someone is appointed at £50k, who is of similar standard to Samantha, but it takes six months for them to be as productive, continuing to impact upon the current team.
The cost to recruit the new person is 20% of the salary, which is £10k.
Knowing Samantha, she would’ve stayed if her organisation paid for the Masters and £2k extra. Factor in the extra stress and strain on the remaining team members and the decrease in productivity, then surely doing what you could to keep Samantha would have been the wise move? She may have even stayed for the Masters and just £1k extra.
Or maybe just for the Masters! And then you would have one happy, motivated employee, who feels valued. And, in effect, have saved yourself some cash.
So, the moral of this little fable is: to cherish your good performers. In most cases it will take a lot less to retain them, than to recruit someone new. And someone new is always a gamble.
You’ll have many Samanthas at your organisation. Imagine the savings in the long run if they were all fairly recognised and encouraged to keep being part of the work family?
This is both in terms of reducing recruitment time and fees, and maintaining productivity.
Money is a factor in people deciding whether to join/leave an organisation, but it’s by no means the only one. In fact, as mojo outlines, there are nine different reasons that people show up to work.
Some up-front investment will help to secure existing talent, save cash on recruitment, maintain morale, and make you more productive. Talent Retention is just one example of why focusing on the ROI of EX is so important. It really can pay even bigger dividends than focussing on the ROI of CX.
To view our EX ROI calculator, click here.
