STRATEGIES TO RETAIN EMPLOYEES

 

 It is difficult for you to get an efficient employee. At the same time, you are reluctant to admit the employee retention issues you face quite often. It becomes essential then for you to find the relevant employee retention techniques.

According to a report, employee turnover can cost from 16% to 213% of the lost pay. The cost-per-hire is estimated at $4,129, and the time to fill in a vacant role is 42 days.

You need to keep the best talents on board. There are strategies available to do it. You can do it even without hiking the employee's salary.

A recent survey by WorldatWork found that the majority of the organizations have faced retaining good professionals. The survey was conducted on 526 professionals. Half of them were not positive about employee retention by their respective companies.

You have to find why the good talents leave. The major reasons are:

1. They get more pay

2. They look for promotion

 

3, Not satisfied with pay compared to other companies

 

4. It was unfair compared to contributions they imparted to the company

 

5. Unsatisfied with the work responsibility

 

6. Heavy Workload

 

7. Work/life balance affected

 

8. Not satisfied with the supervisor

 

9. They don't get training and opportunities for development

 

10. Their abilities underutilized

 

Tactics to Retain Talent 

 

How can you solve these issues effectively? You need not worry. There are ways to tackle employee retention issues.

 

The top tactics to retain them are:

1. Pay them high than the market rate

2. Give incentives and bonus 

3. Keep the top professionals informed that they're indispensable

4. Create work from home facilities

5. Have a B team in place

6. Inform the top professionals of the future opportunities

7. Have job designs for key professionals in place

8. Provide stock options 

 

 There are many reasons for you to accept a job. There is the challenge of exploring new technological frontiers. The opportunity is a factor in engagement and satisfaction. Professionals should be made aware that their skills are unique and used.

Retention begins at the time of onboarding itself. Onboarding can include:

• Introduction to the teams, like HR and the senior leaders
• Meetings with individual colleagues to have a camaraderie
• Training in technical tools and systems related to the job
• Giving opportunity to ask questions to get clarity
• Participating in meetings to see how unrelated departments work 

 

 There should be clarity on what projects are in priority. You have to align the worker's effort on it first. Rejigger the focus as the work progresses. Weekly meetings will help to concentrate on priorities.

Be alert when work is delayed. Then schedule a calendar that details which job is due and guide the employees on quality.

Create milestones for your workers that pertain to your firm's overall strategy. The goals should be clear, measurable and reachable. You and your workers have to follow their progress.

It's important to celebrate milestones, to improve retention rates. A Harvard Review survey study of over 1 million people found that resignations usually abound close to work anniversaries. The reasons could be the end of the contract or psychological factors. A strategy should be in place to acknowledge a work anniversary as a way to improve retention.

You can acknowledge the anniversary by:

• An email announcement
• Congratulating in a town hall meeting
• Having a party 

Retention Factors

When a good professional leaves a business, it is a setback and precipitates issues for his team. There will be unfinished tasks left behind, and you have to assign them to others or do it yourself. It is a large burden. This workload may cause disruptions in sensitive projects.

There can be other downfalls, like:

• Productivity loss 
• Revenue loss
• Loss of team morale 

Losing a talent puts your objectives in peril. It puts your clients in a strange spot because your lost employee was the direct contact.

Employee exit can be a messy affair. It is best to avoid such developments from the start. To retain them, you have to understand them. Some reasons are not in your control. They include:

• position changes
• Relocation
• Resigning to start a new venture

Some may leave you for reasons you could have avoided, such as:

• Shoddy management
• Limited career prospects
• Limited work challenge
• Lack of satisfaction

There are certain factors you have to take care of post onboarding.

The employees should have a feeling of autonomy. They should know what they're doing. They should have a feeling that the job is beyond their expectations.

 Take care not to over promise and under deliver. If you don't keep the promise, the employee will feel cheated. It dents your goodwill and will make your retention tactics useless.

It can irrevocably damage your employees trust in you.It would help if you were not complacent in treating your existing employees.

Don't take your staff for granted. It is one of the traits of fast-growing companies to neglect their existing high-performing workforce favouring newer ones.

There should be fair appraisals, reasonable salary hikes, promotions, and recognition. You have to ensure that they are within the culture.

Retention Techniques

You have to keep employees happy. It is important to ensure that workers stay. It also should be ensured that they are productive. You can use the following techniques to ensure happiness:

• Train employees, ensure they are equipped. Spend resources.
• Implement health insurance, provide gym memberships, wellness holidays
• Provide regular feedback 
• Give rewards and incentives for excellence
• Set clear goals for employees to advance inside

Spend enough time and attention on your relationships. By retaining good talent, you'll have a rich bank of institutional knowledge. You can fill vacancies with loyal employees instead of unknown outsiders. When you look for outside talent, having high retention numbers can be an added advantage. The company appears attractive to good applicants.

Some industries have historically suffered from high employee supply and are accustomed to losing talent. The hotel and service industry is an example. It has a 73% turnover rate in the US. Even there, you can buck the trend. 

There are several roadblocks in achieving job optimization for key talents and the functions they do. They are given unrelated tasks quite often. It burdens them.

Use of Technology: There are ways to minimize or mitigate these tasks through the diligent use of technology. There are at least Google Chrome Extensions for Security & Productivity, like, google hangouts, Universal File Opener (UFO), LastPass, The Great Suspender, HTTPS Everywhere, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Grammarly, and Momentum.

Google Hangouts is an excellent tool to chat, call, and video conference with colleagues. The Hangouts extension gives all you're used to in a convenient package. With Chrome, you get notifications and use Hangouts even if Chrome is closed. It's by Google and is secure.

UFO is a useful tool. It enables you to work on non-Google files like Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop and then update those on Google Drive. If you're working with a client who doesn't use Google Drive., you would have to download it, make changes, then re-upload his file. If you have lots of documents, it can be confusing. In UFO, you can download the Word document and make changes like before. The difference is that your updates sync directly with the document on Google Drive. 

 

LastPass is a password management tool. It helps you secure online accounts. A master password is required to access LastPass. It then generates secure passwords for your accounts. The new passwords are auto-filled into the websites. You need not worry about memorizing them. LastPass does a great job keeping your profiles safe. You have to remember only one password.

 

You may have several tabs open on your browser at a time. The Great Suspender solves this issue by suspending it. It can slow down lower your laptop's battery life. 

 

 Grammarly checks your grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It makes sure that your messages are correct.

 

Momentum replaces Google Chrome's new tab layout with a productivity suite. It features a beautiful background photo with a customized message; momentum sets your daily goals, tracks your lists, and monitors the weather. 

 

AODocs' content management platform gives employees intuitive tools with a UI/UX. The result is employee engagement and increased efficiency.

 

AODocs can help you strengthen recruitment processes in a platform, especially for HR Content Management.

 

Google Workspace radically improves collaboration; AOBox allows teams and collaborators to access, share, and interact with files through Google Drive, even without a Google account.

 

Conclusion

 

Collaboration is the key to retention. With new integration tools like Google Workspace, individuals can benefit from a productive and personalized work lifestyle. Companies profit from collaborative, robust teams.

Human connections are essential to an organization's well-being. All people do not require the same ratio of socialization. They have different cuisines, hobbies, and living spaces. Despite the differences, we all need a sense of belonging. It is a fundamental human psyche and is not confined between 9 am - 5 pm. Employees have to be engaged to live in the workplace, to make it a living space.

Companies can achieve this collaboration through platforms like Workplace by Facebook. You'll be amazed by how it improves engagement communication and rejuvenates your ecosystem.

 

 © Ramachandran 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DATA LAKE AND WAREHOUSE:DIFFERENCES

 

Lakes form part of the Earth's water cycle. Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean. It is located in a basin, surrounded by land, apart from any rivers or other outlets. Anything can enter it freely.
 
Like it, the data lake is in a mess.
 
A data lake is a place where new data can tress pass without any hurdles. Since any data can reside in a data lake, it is a fountainhead of new ideas, and you are free to experiment with data. Due to this liberalism, it suffers from an absurd structure.
 
In data warehousing, you try to match dimensions and measures into questionable components that are consistent. Here the scalability traits of the data warehouse gain meaning and depth. Warehousing makes it easier for a thirsty audience to consume this data.
 
Data lakes and warehouses are widely used for storing big data, but they are not interchangeable terms. The two types of data storage are often confused but are much more different than they are alike. The only real similarity between them is their high-level purpose of storing data.
 
There are certain key differences between a data lake and a warehouse.
 
Operation
 
While a data warehouse is used for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), a data lake performs raw data analysis.
 
OLAP includes running reports, aggregating queries, performing analysis, and creating models based on whatever you want to do. These operations are carried out after your transactions. If your client's data is stored in a denormalized format, you can fetch the data easily and bring the required report.
 
Data Lake is a storage repository that stores huge structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. At the same time, Data Warehouse is a blending of technologies and components which allows the strategic use of data. Data Lake stores all data are irrespective of the source and structure, whereas Data Warehouse stores data in quantitative metrics with their attributes.
 
The raw data in XML files, images, pdf, etc., are gathered for analysis in a data lake. You may not know how this data can be used in the future. You can freely apply analytics to get insights.
 
Low-Cost Data Lake
 
In a warehouse, the cost of data storage is high. The software used by these warehouses is expensive. The cost of maintenance is also high. Since a data warehouse contains large amounts of data in a denormalized format, it takes up a lot of disk space. In data lakes, the cost is low. You use inexpensive open-source software. Data lakes can scale to high volumes of data at a low cost.

Data warehouses use schema-on-write, while lakes employ schema-on-read. You need to know the purpose of the data before importing it into the Warehouse. In the first instance, before storing the data, it has to be transformed and provided for application in analytics and reporting. You may have to reevaluate the models later.
 
In data lakes, without the necessity of a single schema, users can store any data. They can discover the schema later while reading it. Different teams can store data in the same place without relying on IT people.
 
A data warehouse will have high-quality data. The data undergoes curation before storage; it is the absolute truth. A data lake is filled with raw data.
 
Data analysts use lakes. Large corporates with tons of data opt for the first. Business professionals use warehouses. Warehouses store sensitive data. Data Lake is a new technology, and security is still developing. The Hadoop ecosystem is aligned to the data lake.
 
Data lakes empower users to access data before it has been transformed, cleansed and structured. It allows users to get to their results more quickly compared to the traditional data warehouse. Warehouses offer insights into predefined questions for predefined data types. Any changes to the Warehouse needs more time.
 
Data Lakes use of the ELT (Extract Load Transform) process. The Warehouse uses a traditional ETL (Extract Transform Load) process. The main complaint against warehouses is the inability, or the problem faced when trying to change them. Lakes integrate different data types to answer new questions as these users are not likely to use data warehouses because they may need to go beyond their capabilities. In the Warehouse, most users in an organization are operational. These types of users only care about reports and key performance metrics.
 
Data Lake is ideal for those who want in-depth analysis, whereas Warehouse is ideal for operational users.
 
A data lake is the starting point. It is the stage at which the Warehouse structures its data. An organization that incorporates both showcases entrepreneurship and strategy.
 
Different Spheres
 
Data warehouses have been used for many years in the healthcare industry. Still, it has never been hugely successful. Data warehouses are generally not ideal because of the unstructured nature of much of the data like physicians notes, clinical data, etc. Data lakes allow for a combination of structured and unstructured data, which tends to be a better fit for healthcare companies.

In recent years, the value of big data in education reform has become enormously apparent. Data about student grades, attendance, and more can help to fail students get back on track and help predict potential issues before they occur. Flexible big data solutions have also helped educational institutions streamline billing, improve fundraising, and more.

Much of this data is vast and very raw, so many times, institutions in the education sphere benefit best from the flexibility of data lakes.

In finance and other business settings, a data warehouse is often the best storage model because it can be structured for access by the entire company rather than a data scientist.

Big data has helped the financial services industry make big strides, and data warehouses have been a big player in those strides. Such a model may drive away a finance company because it is more cost-effective but ineffective for other purposes.

In the transportation industry, especially in supply chain management, the prediction capability that comes from flexible data in a data lake can have huge benefits, namely cost-cutting benefits realized by examining data from forms within the transport pipeline.

Four Differences
 
There are four key differences between a data lake and a Warehouse:
 
1. Lake is raw, Warehouse is processed
2. In the lake, the purpose of data is not determined; it is currently in use in the Warehouse.
3. Data scientists use the lake; business professionals use the Warehouse.
4. Lake is highly accessible and quick to update; Warehouse is complex and costly to make changes.
 
 
 
 © Ramachandran