If you’re managing a business with hourly distributed workers, you’re no stranger to competitive labor markets. But even seasoned businesses struggle to find and keep skilled workers during a labor shortage. After all, candidates are in short supply during the Great Resignation, turnover is skyrocketing and your competitors are increasing wages in an effort to fill positions.
This landscape has left many employers straining under new wage and benefit pressures created by rival businesses. Competition for talent has led to steep hourly rate increases of 5.6% between March 2021 and March 2022. So if you’re struggling to attract and retain a truly competitive workforce, the solution might lie in improving levels of employee satisfaction.
After all, there must be a better way!
The Benefits of Employee Satisfaction
Studies show that an engaged and happy workforce supports greater corporate success. Recognizing employee satisfaction as a key metric in measuring operational success allows you to:
- Lower workforce turnover by supporting employee fulfillment.
- Attract new talent by becoming an employer of choice.
- Increase productivity by retaining a full, fully motivated workforce.
- Please your customers by ensuring the terms of your contracts are met.
- Save on hiring, onboarding and training expenses while increasing your return on investment (ROI).
- Minimize safety and compliance risks by maintaining a quality workforce.
In a difficult labor market, it makes infinitely more sense to keep your current employees happy—and therefore on your payroll–than to spend valuable time and money recruiting, hiring, and training their replacements. However, that’s easier said than done.
The Key to Making Employees Happy
When it comes to employee retention, never underestimate the danger of allowing low morale to flourish in your workplace. Even if you can’t always match the wages of a competitor, happy employees are more likely to stick around. Here are some baseline suggestions for ensuring your employees have compelling reasons to stay:
- Maintain accurate and dependable pay. When employees lose trust in your ability to pay them correctly or on time, they turn to more reliable employers. You must be able to correctly process garnishments, withholdings, off-cycle pay, bonuses, blended overtime, shift differentials and meal breaks on time each and every time. The more dependable and precise you can make payroll processing, the better. On-demand pay helps, too.
- Provide worker schedules in advance. Advanced notice of employee schedules helps manage expectations, facilitate trust and promote communication between you and your employees. By allowing employees scheduling flexibility and the ability to swap and bid on open shifts, employees are likely to experience less burnout, have more control over their work-life balance and be less likely to look for competing job offers.
- Offer remote or hybrid opportunities. In today’s competitive talent landscape, employees are demanding more flexibility from their employers to work remotely. Having workers come into the office every day when they don’t need to, or perhaps want to, seems to be a difficult sell in today’s workforce.
- Provide effective training, communication and accessibility. Feeling properly trained is critical to employee satisfaction, even if that means attending extra classes, watching a series of training videos, or working through a mentorship. If you aren’t offering multi-lingual instructions, reviewable content, and open lines of communication between staff and supervisors, you’re ultimately setting your people up to fail. And no one wants to stay somewhere where they feel like they aren’t able to succeed.
- Create opportunities for growth. If your employees feel that they don’t have opportunities to advance, especially with regards to pay or taking on more responsibility, they will feel stuck and look to improve their prospects. Do you offer your employees access to some type of skills tracking or performance measurements? How about tracks for promotion or title changes? Developing these avenues for advancement helps alert your employees that you value their growth and wish to provide further opportunities to them.
How EPAY Helps Employees Choose Your Business
EPAY offers companies a better way to help them facilitate their operations by giving you a solution that benefits your workers and leads to improved job satisfaction. EPAY’s full Human Capital Management (HCM) solution includes:
- Complete payroll and tax processing, including the accommodation of multiple Employer Identification Numbers (EINs), garnishment processing, tax filing and optional pay card programs.
- Powerful performance management solutions, including skills tracking, self-review features and goal management.
- Mobile capabilities complete with reminders, shift bidding and swapping, and access to schedules as well as pay and benefit summaries.
- A flexible learning management solution that including skills, education and performance tracking as well as online learning content.
- An easy way to track time and attendance while helping to prevent time-theft opportunities.
There’s no better way to handle all of those HR-related tasks, and that’s why our customers have been trusting us for more than two decades to help them lower costs while boosting their productivity and employee engagement.
Ready to find a better way? Contact us to learn more today.
