What to do if your employees keep getting poached

Do your employees keep getting poached? There’s no quick fix, however here are some simple questions to ask yourself which can be a conversation starter for your organisation.

An obvious one to start with - do you remunerate your employees well?
Do you offer a competitive base salary? Health insurance? Subsidised gym memberships? A health and wellbeing allowance? Phone allowance? Share incentive scheme?

Salary alone isn’t going to stop your employees from being poached, but it’s a good place to start – do your research and benchmark where your organisation is in comparison to its competitors. Pick up the phone to your recruiter for some advice if you’re unsure where to go.

Other benefits such as subsidised gym memberships or a monthly phone allowance don’t have to cost a fortune, but it can really help bolster your benefits package to contribute to staff retention and attracting talent.

Have a think about the time, effort and money that goes into replacing staff that leave or are poached. By investing in your employees, you will honestly reap the benefits.

Do you offer flexible working arrangements?
If your organisation doesn’t offer flexibility such as the option to work from home (even if it’s just one day per week!), I’m afraid to say it, but the likelihood of you losing employees to those that do is very high.

When our people2people team reached out to job seekers in 2021, flexible working arrangements as well as work life balance and company culture were ranked as the top three most important factors in their job search.

As a recruiter, I can tell you nowadays that 9 times out of 10, job seekers want to know what the work from home policy is when seeking new job opportunities, and if it’s not offered, it’s usually the case they’re not interested.

Have you a robust training program in place?
Even if you’re ticking the boxes in terms of remuneration and other benefits such as flexible working, often we hear from job seekers who feel like they’ve reached their limit within an organisation and have no room to grow.

You should be having ongoing conversations on this topic with all employees – is there a course you could put someone on to improve managerial/leadership capabilities, is there something you as a manager or business owner could delegate to hand over more responsibility and give others more of a purpose and motivation in their role? Employees want to feel like they’re constantly learning and growing. If they start to feel stagnant, the likelihood of them wanting to find a new role will start to rise.

Do you undertake a 360-performance review i.e., employees review their managers as well as managers reviewing their team members?
I still find it surprising that the norm remains where managers review their team members, and that’s pretty much where the appraisal process ends. It can be as simple as engaging with a survey provider and putting out an anonymous survey to all staff for them to appraise their manager, although research does suggest that direct and open communication is the most effective method for successful 360 reviews. Whichever route you go down, this can be an amazing tool used to highlight areas for improvement.

Are there signs of a ‘toxic’ workplace culture?

o  High staff turnover?

o  Office gossip?

o  Lots of negativity?

o  Lack of trust in leadership?

One of these factors alone doesn’t necessarily constitute a toxic workplace, however if you resonate with a number of these factors then the chances are, urgent action needs to be taken to avoid staff leaving or getting poached.

Have you an exit interview process?
So much information about an organisation’s culture can be sought from an exit interview. Exiting employees are often much more open about their genuine reasons for leaving and there’s usually more to it than the reason they give when handing in their notice.

Issues surrounding culture, training, management and benefits can be uncovered and give an organisation great insight as to where they can improve and stop employees from being tempted if approached about other job opportunities.

It’s very important that the exiting employee feels they have a safe forum to communicate any issues, as often they’re worried about ruining their chances of a positive reference in the future if they do highlight negative experiences.

There’s so much more that can be delved into with each of these topics, however open communication and trust are at the heart of triggering positive change.

It sounds simple, but if you’re not doing it already, why not start by putting in place weekly catchups with your team (they don’t have to take long!) and ask what the biggest frustrations were that they faced in the last week. This can catch issues in the early stages before they develop into something much bigger and allows employees and managers to get things off their chest and feel listened to.