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Rewarding loyal employees

Employ­ers have come to terms with the cur­rent employ­ment trend of job-hop­ping, work­ers mov­ing jobs every two or three years. In fact, some encour­age it as fresh recruits, keen to prove them­selves to their new boss, are seen as poten­tial­ly more moti­vat­ed and pro­duc­tive.

But what of those who choose to stay put; the loy­al work­ers who stick with the same com­pa­ny for ten or more years? Are they val­ued for the skills and knowl­edge they help their organ­i­sa­tion to retain or seen as lack­ing in ambi­tion and aspi­ra­tion?

“Employ­ee move­ment inter­nal­ly and exter­nal­ly is becom­ing more preva­lent, but the long-term, trust­ed employ­ee remains a key part of any organ­i­sa­tion,” says Rachael Allen, head of peo­ple and cul­ture at glob­al resourc­ing firm BPS World. “In fact, there is an argu­ment that they hold a high­er sta­tus than 20 or 30 years ago, when in most com­pa­nies, a career was for life. This should be seen as an oppor­tu­ni­ty.

“While organ­i­sa­tions val­ue long-serv­ing employ­ees, they some­times for­get to tell them. It is under­stand­able that some­one new in a role requires pro­por­tion­al­ly high­er lev­els of atten­tion, but that doesn’t mean the estab­lished should be for­got­ten. This can be a chal­lenge, but should be an oppor­tu­ni­ty. As men­tors, many are able to com­ple­ment more for­mal learn­ing and devel­op­ment pro­grammes, which is engag­ing for both the men­tor and the mentee.”

Rewarding loyalty

Long ser­vice also needs to be prop­er­ly recog­nised and reward­ed. A 2012 report from employ­ee ben­e­fits firm Edenred found that only 50 per cent of UK com­pa­nies had reviewed their long-ser­vice pol­i­cy in the last five years.

Long ser­vice may be the most com­mon form of recog­ni­tion, but that doesn’t mean they’re get­ting much ben­e­fit from it, says Glenn Elliott, chief exec­u­tive and founder of employ­ee engage­ment firm Reward Gate­way.

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“Cel­e­brate long ser­vice, but recog­nise and reward per­for­mance in accor­dance with com­pa­ny val­ues and pri­or­i­ties. If you have long tenure and you’ve been doing a great job liv­ing the company’s val­ues, you should have received con­tin­u­ous recog­ni­tion for that, not just recog­ni­tion and reward for the num­ber of years you’ve been in the role,” he says.

Some sec­tors lend them­selves to staff longevi­ty bet­ter than oth­ers. In man­u­fac­tur­ing, account­ing, the pub­lic sec­tor and util­i­ties, for exam­ple, staff turnover rates are tra­di­tion­al­ly low.  This may be because a high­er pro­por­tion of work­ers are from an old­er gen­er­a­tion who see val­ue in career ser­vice. In retail, call cen­tres, hos­pi­tal­i­ty and food ser­vices, high lev­els of staff turnover are the norm.

“This is most­ly due to low earn­ing poten­tial, sea­son­al work and rep­u­ta­tions for part-time and short-term employ­ment,” says Sam­my Blind­ell, founder of How To Build A Brand. “IT com­pa­nies also tend to have high turnover rates, which is main­ly due to the change­able nature of the indus­try.”

Work­forces span­ning four gen­er­a­tions of employ­ees with a mix of short and long-term tenures are becom­ing increas­ing­ly preva­lent. Here employ­ers need to focus on reward­ing com­mit­ment, loy­al­ty and going over and above the call of duty – things that don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly relate to tenure – and the key to this lies in the cal­i­bre of lead­er­ship with­in the organ­i­sa­tion.

Cel­e­brate long ser­vice, but recog­nise and reward per­for­mance in accor­dance with com­pa­ny val­ues and pri­or­i­ties

Mark Why­brow, founder of lead­er­ship devel­op­ment firm Engage Tech­nique, says: “Good lead­er­ship and man­age­ment should be able to get under the skin of what moti­vates the dif­fer­ent parts of their team com­mu­ni­ty and respond to it. The key is doing this in a high­ly empa­thet­ic way for the dif­fer­ent ‘cohorts’ with­in the team – long-servers, new recruits, domes­tic and inter­na­tion­al employ­ees, and so on.

“Good behav­iour and atti­tude should be recog­nised, and poor­er behav­iours should be under­stood, resolved and improved, or iden­ti­fied with pos­si­ble future con­se­quences, all regard­less of tenure of ser­vice.”

How it works

Com­pa­nies such as Vir­gin Group excel at recog­nis­ing the val­ue of high-achiev­ing, long-ser­vice employ­ees and on the whole enjoy high­er-than-aver­age employ­ee reten­tion rates.

Vir­gin Group brand direc­tor and head of peo­ple expe­ri­ence Amy Saw­bridge says: “The Vir­gin cul­ture encour­ages peo­ple to be them­selves and play to their strengths. This gives them the free­dom to be cre­ative and take oppor­tu­ni­ties to make a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence in what they do, and also inspires pas­sion and com­mit­ment to do a great job for our cus­tomers.

“Our ulti­mate pur­pose is to change busi­ness for good and, thanks to the sol­id foun­da­tions of the Vir­gin cul­ture across the group and the vari­ety we offer in terms of our sec­tors and roles, we’re in a strong posi­tion to do that.”

With­in large organ­i­sa­tions there is often a ten­den­cy for longer-serv­ing staff to stay in the same depart­ment for long peri­ods of time. As they become increas­ing­ly dis­en­gaged, they become unpro­duc­tive or they leave. One solu­tion may be to find bet­ter posi­tions for them in oth­er depart­ments.

Glob­al tal­ent acqui­si­tion firm Alexan­der Mann Solu­tions recent­ly cre­at­ed an inter­nal deploy­ment plat­form for one of its clients, San­tander, designed in part to help retain long-serv­ing employ­ees. With tens of thou­sands of employ­ees world­wide, San­tander had huge amounts of data, not just from its own human resources records, but also from third-par­ty plat­forms such as LinkedIn. This mas­sive infor­ma­tion resource was used to cre­ate a tai­lored plat­form that uses sophis­ti­cat­ed algo­rithms to match employ­ees with per­son­alised career sug­ges­tions holis­ti­cal­ly and proac­tive­ly.

Alexan­der Mann Solu­tions direc­tor of glob­al client ser­vices Vanes­sa Byrnes says: “While tal­ent man­age­ment strate­gies and bud­gets are often built around can­di­date attrac­tion, the chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties that long-serv­ing col­leagues present for HR lead­ers should nev­er be ignored. At a time when the aver­age tenure of indi­vid­ual employ­ees is rapid­ly decreas­ing, HR must look at the reten­tion of loy­al, effec­tive long-stand­ing work­ers as a firm line of defence in the war for tal­ent.

“A per­son­alised and intu­itive inter­nal deploy­ment plat­form ensures that team mem­bers remain inter­est­ed, engaged and inspired by oppor­tu­ni­ties avail­able in-house.”

Nev­er­the­less, while com­pa­nies spend a vast amount of time look­ing at why peo­ple leave their job, there is a case for look­ing at why they stay.

Claire Har­vey, senior divi­sion­al direc­tor at recruit­ment firm Reed, says: “Moti­va­tion can be affect­ed by salary, hours of work, envi­ron­ment – and get­ting this right nur­tures good rela­tion­ships with staff.

“Often com­pa­nies will offer over and above the mar­ket rate; some have a pol­i­cy to pay 10 per cent more than their com­peti­tors so they won’t lose peo­ple for salary rea­sons. This can be good and bad as some employ­ees, who are not per­form­ing at their opti­mum, will not leave – low staff turnover isn’t always a great sta­tis­tic for HR.”