How To Increase Employee Retention To Scale A Content Agency
Increasing employee retention is something every company strives for because it means that you retain your employees until you create the perfect team. Retaining employees is relatively difficult for every company, but it is necessary. When you’re trying to scale a content agency, employee retention automatically becomes your top priority.
This is because a content agency’s number one priority is the consistency of quality, and the only way to ensure that is to retain your team. To scale a content agency, you need to make sure that your employees are engaged, satisfied, and happy, which would subsequently help retain them.
To do that and increase your employee engagement and retention, you can try the following things:
Offer Competitive Employee Benefits
Nowadays, people have started to focus more on their personal happiness and mental health, thus, giving preference to things like employee benefits over salaries. This means that having a competitive employee benefits package has become necessary.
However, to truly retain your employees, you need to make sure that the benefits you provide are, in fact, better than what your competitors provide. If you don’t have the resources to do so, you should try and provide unique benefits that don’t cost anything, but improve the overall working conditions.
Such benefits can include letting people work from home, letting them dress casually, and allowing them more vacation days, among other things. These employment benefits tend to go a long way because they make work more convenient, easier, and more fun.
Never Overwhelm Your Employees
Everyone has a point after which they can’t be productive anymore. Usually, this point resets the next day but if you overburden your employees to that point on any single day, the effects are bound to linger for much longer.
While efficiency and productivity go hand in hand, they start to become inversely proportional, as you increase the amount of work. For example, if you get done with 10 projects a day, that is very efficient. However, your productivity only allows you to give your best to the first 5 projects. This way, you end up with 5 additional projects that are completed, but have subpar quality.
This is why it’s best to never overwhelm your employees. It’s always better to have less work than more, since keeping your employees in place is much more important than keeping your clients.
Give Your Employees Meaningful Work
People today work for more than just money. They want their work to be meaningful, to have value. When your work creates value for other people, in any way, there is an internal rush of satisfaction. Salaries are relatively instant gratification, but satisfaction from meaningful work is delayed gratification, which tends to be better twin folds.
To get meaningful work, you should first revise your company values and goals to reflect a more stoic approach. You should then try and find clients with similar interests, values, and goals.
This would ensure that the work you do creates real value, and that your employees feel like they’re making a difference.
Help Employees Develop Professionally
Your employees are not only working for you, but also for themselves. This means that all the work they do, they do it to also grow and learn professionally. Employees need professional development, as much as your organization needs them. Which is why most companies make an active effort to invest in employees’ professional development.
When you help your employees develop professionally, you help them polish their current skills, and develop new ones. Moreover, you then have an employee who’s more skilled and knowledgeable, which eliminates the need to hire someone else from scratch.
This not only saves your organization time and resources, but also ensures that you develop a strong, highly skilled team.
Understand Your Employees
Another important thing is to make a habit of conversing with your employees. It’s important to have conversations that go beyond work, because that’s the only way you can understand your employees. If you have an idea about what your employee wants, thinks, and feels, you can better gauge why they stay.
The idea is to understand which part of your retention strategy works for each of the employees. You will need to identify these points individually for each of your employees. Once you have an idea, you can then refine and target your retention efforts towards the right employees.
The Bottom Line
Scaling a content agency can be hard if you do it the right way and easy if you cut corners. This means that if you stay true to your promise of consistent quality, then scaling will take time because you will need to develop your employees, build a team, and understand how to retain them.
However, that doesn’t mean that it’s not doable. To increase employee retention, the aforementioned strategies tend to work best when scaling a content agency.
