In this hyper-competitive era, organizations strive to attract new talent due to growing skills demand. Therefore, businesses need to retain their existing talent to ensure profitability and success.
However, despite formulating multiple strategies for retention, companies often fail to reduce the turnover rate, which can also lead to skill shortages in the company. This high turnover rate can be attributed to multiple factors.
A work institutes report predicted that:
“One in four workers leave their jobs due to unsupportive management, low pay scale, poor company culture, and a lack of development opportunities.”
From an organizational standpoint, employers can enhance retention in multiple ways. One of the proven strategies is to implement resource management.
This article highlights the significance of retention and how resource management software can help you improve the retention rate.
Let’s begin;
Why is employee retention important?
It’s no secret that retaining top talent is key to any company’s success and growth. For one, recruiting and training new employees requires a significant investment and is time-consuming. For two, when seasoned employees leave, employers lose the knowledge and expertise built over the years. So, retaining the workforce is imperative to avoid these repercussions.
When you have quality employees, you will deliver better products and services. If you fail to retain your best employees, it will result in a loss of competitive edge. Adopting employee retention techniques will assist you in developing a long-term connection with your staff. Furthermore, it will promote job satisfaction, resulting in greater employee productivity, corporate loyalty, and profitability.
Considering the benefits that organizations reap from low turnover, it’s imperative for companies to adopt the right employee retention strategy coupled with resource management software. It can streamline multiple processes, from maintaining the resource health index to empowering the workforce.
Let’s discuss this in detail in the following section:
How can resource management software enhance employee retention?
Here’s a rundown of how Saviom’s robust resource management software benefits companies in enhancing the retention rate:
Enable competent resource allocation to the right job
Allocating the right resource to the right job is critical to engage resources and ensure employee productivity. For instance, if a less experienced resource is assigned to fulfill a skill-intensive task, it can make them feel frustrated, burned out, and affect their performance.
On the other hand, if you keep assigning BAU or admin work to skilled resources, they might lose interest and feel their potential is not being leveraged optimally. In either case, the chances of turnover are high. A resource management tool will help to ensure competent resource allocation across the enterprise.
Managers can use appropriate filters that can help identify the best-fit resources and assign them to suitable projects matching the qualification, skills, experience, cost, and availability. When your employees feel their competencies are utilized in the right place, they will feel motivated and continue working with your organization.
Optimize workforce utilization across the enterprise
Overutilization can put employees under immense stress, cause burnout, and result in unplanned attrition. At the same time, underutilization can lead to disengagement and low morale. Thus, managers must ascertain that employees’ maximum time is booked on strategic/billable work while ensuring no one is under or overloaded against their capacity.
A resource management tool integrated with Business Intelligence procures real-time data-driven dashboards and reports. It provides insights into resource utilization metrics which managers can use to analyze if the resources are over/underutilized or if most of their time is booked for non-billable or admin work. Accordingly, they can implement corrective measures to optimize employees’ schedules and utilization.
Facilitate effective bench management
An increase in bench time is a direct outcome of 2 factors- unmanaged ramp up & ramp down activities and unplanned/wrongful hiring. This makes the resources spend idle time on the bench until they are allocated to any new project.
Besides affecting the bottom line, it also leads to planned and unplanned attrition as employees will feel disengaged and begin looking for other job opportunities for growth and development. A robust resource management tool provides comprehensive visibility of all resource schedules.
With its forecasting features, managers can proactively predict resources that will end up on the bench in advance. Furthermore, they can use project vacancy reports to quickly assign suitable benched resources to appropriate billable or strategic work. If their skills do not align with any project vacancies, then on-the-job training or reskilling can be taken up, keeping them engaged and preparing them for future projects.
Provide more career development opportunities
Providing employees with ample career development opportunities is one of the successful ways to ensure their retention. In addition, encouraging mentoring, job shadowing, and out rotation helps in increasing employee engagement.
It also allows employees to diversify their skillsets which increases their billability. A robust resource management software with 360-degree visibility of the enterprise-wide resource pool can provide information on all projects on a unified platform.
As a result, managers can allocate cross-departmental resources. Thus, employees can work on different projects based on their skillset and availability across departmental boundaries. Providing them exposure and experience will also leave no room for attrition cycles.
Implement learning & development programs
Personalizing a training and development plan for your resources is a perfect way to retain them. When the workforce feels that their goals and objectives are being taken care of, they will stay with the firm longer. In collaboration with a people’s manager, a resource manager can implement an Individual Development Plan or IDP to help employees reach short and long-term career goals.
Modern resource management software provides foresight into pipeline project demand which helps managers to identify a skill gap ahead of the curve. It will also give them information about resources that require training and upskilling, which helps improve current job performance while preparing the workforce for future endeavors.
Based on this, they can streamline learning and development activities for the existing workforce. Further, you can configure your tool with a training scheduling solution which will help to book the courses slots based on resource availability.
Empower employees to choose areas of interest
Managers frequently fail to consider the interests of resources when assigning them to projects. As a result, their levels of engagement and productivity suffer. Furthermore, if not addressed on time, it might result in attrition. To avoid this predicament, the resource manager can publish open positions alerting all individuals matching the required competency and skillset.
Using the resource management tool, employees can choose work as per their area of interest. For example, if they are interested in taking up a particular task in a project, they can simply revert to the specific vacancy with their level of interest.
Resource managers will then screen all the applications and pick the best-fit resources for the projects. This practice helps businesses retain their employees by empowering them to choose what they want to work for. This also enhances task ownership, satisfaction, and performance.
Conclusion
Formulating a retention strategy is only half the battle won. Pairing this strategy with the right resource management solution can prove highly beneficial in retaining employees. It will give you the best possible return by helping you empower and engage the workforce that will motivate and inspire them to stay with you for the long haul.
