HR Managers need to think like Marketers to retain staff. Here’s why.

Retention is on everyone’s mind right now:

• Marketing Managers want to retain customers
  
• HR Managers want to retain staff
  
• Modern organizations are changing the conversation away from "Staff are our biggest cost" to "People (and culture) are our greatest asset"
  

Needless to say, retention is a top priority for businesses of all shapes, sizes and industries all over the world – and for good reason. It costs a lot to lose good people and a lot to find someone to replace the loss.
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If you’re in HR, figuring out strategies to retain your staff is probably one of the many things keeping you awake at night. Worse is, your CEO may be a little reluctant to allocate a budget for staff retention initiatives; at least not to the same level as they would for customer retention.

Why? Simple.

Marketing has a clearer link to ROI for retention strategies than HR often does, despite the actual figures being fairly similar. So, how can you address this?

‍Marketing and Human Resources are essentially the same thing – only your audience (or “customers”) are internal.

This means that to effectively retain staff, you need to think more like a Marketer and look at staff retention as a revenue-generating function of the business that your decision-makers can’t ignore. In this article, we’re going to explain how HR Managers can benefit from thinking like a Marketer and present staff retention as a way to save business costs, gain more revenue and achieve business goals.

What is staff retention? How is it like customer retention?

Staff retention (or employee retention) covers the strategies that an organization adopts to reduce the risk and associated costs of employee turnover, both voluntary and involuntary.

This greatly affects the business, with staff turnover costs averaging around $20 million for mid-sized companies. Beyond saving the business from unnecessary and burdensome turnover expenses, staff retention also allows businesses to:

• increase productivity
  
• retain company IP
  
• promote a healthier company culture, and
  
• deliver a better customer experience.
  

From this viewpoint, staff retention seems like a non-negotiable aspect of HR management! However, companies often don’t invest as much in employee retention as they do in customer retention.

That’s because the costs and benefits of staff retention are not always obvious from the perspective of decision-makers like CEOs and business owners.

Marketers, for example, know for a fact that acquiring new customers can cost four to five times more than retaining existing customers. And because repeat customers spend over 67% more than new customers, they become worthwhile investments that Marketers can focus on.

These are well-known facts that a good marketing team will leverage to pitch ideas and get the budget they need to run customer retention campaigns.

However, employee retention is no different from customer retention: losing employees also costs the business, so it’s more productive to retain employees for many reasons.

So, if you’re a HR Manager, this is your sign to think more like a Marketer.

Take inspiration from the marketing playbook and follow their tried and tested techniques to help decrease turnover numbers and master retention strategies that will support the business as a whole. Here are the 5 key steps that marketing teams use to retain customers:

So, HR managers need to do comprehensive research on employees too.Think of your internal teams as your customers. To keep them engaged in the organization, you need to develop a thorough understanding of their needs, pain points and aspirations. To start, get answers to the following questions:

• What are their career progression plans?
  
• What role do they see themselves in, within a year? 5 years?
  
• What do they love the most about working for this company?
  
• What internal opportunities would excite them?
  
• What would drive them to leave?
  
• What would encourage them to stay?
  

You can get the answers to these through:

• interviews
  
• surveys
  
• focus group discussions
  
• smart HR tech Internal Talent Marketplace platforms like GoFIGR that can collect this data proactively for you
  

This way, you have a full view of what employees are feeling now and what they are envisioning for the future. However these techniques have the limitation of a real disconnect between what people say (or think you want to say) and what they actually do. The gold standard for understanding how marketing retention strategies perform is through measurable behavioural data. In the HR environment, smart HR tech Internal Marketplace platforms like GoFIGR not only collect the data but also help determine the future retention strategies that will have maximum impact.

This means, HR Managers need to analyse the data they’ve gathered and use it to gather key insights.As HR Managers, this step allows you to identify:

• what your employees require to be motivated
  
• what skills need to be further utilized
  
• how you can help employees with their career goals
  
• what training opportunities you can facilitate
  
• and those team members who are at risk of attrition

Understandably, this can be a tedious process. That’s why marketers often utilize MarTech (Marketing Technology) during this step of the process to aggregate data and get a suite of insights they can utilize. Fortunately, there are also

HR Managers can also use insights to formulate effective retention strategies.This is the step where you identify goals, time frames and target ROIs. Where Marketers will define how much revenue they’re bringing in by retaining customers, HR Managers can identify how much employee retention is saving the business (including the profits lost when the people who perform the revenue-generating tasks leave the company) and so on. By uniting employee insights with business goals, you can come up with clear retention strategies that will connect with the organizational priorities.

HR managers can pitch strategies in the same way.Start by highlighting the research you’ve gathered, the goals you have established and how attaining them can help the business' bottom line and culture. If done correctly and persuasively, your pitch will provide the organization with the strong business case it needs to focus more on retaining staff.

Design a complete presentation with a cost-benefit analysis backed by research, just how Marketing experts would pitch a new ad campaign idea. That’s how you get the company to pay attention to staff retention. To work out what employee turnover is costing your business, you can try our Employee

HR Managers also need to follow through on the plan and deliver.Once you have your plan and your budget approved, it's time to turn ideas into actions and connect with your staff, motivating them to stay and protecting the business from ongoing turnover costs. Where a Marketer would publish educational content pieces across different channels to offer value, you can facilitate ongoing training and seminars to hone your team members’ skills. It also helps to reward staff loyalty, celebrate achievements and provide internal opportunities to continuously motivate employees to stay with the company and help with its growth.To do this, it’s important to acknowledge that retention is not the sole burden of HR. It takes a team effort to move forward, and HR steers the wheel. And best of all.....by collecting the right data throughout the journey you'll be in a position to not only measure the value attributable to the HR efforts, but also further interrogate the data and understand where retention improvements can be made.

As this is a complex process, you need a reliable system to help navigate all of these steps, just like how Marketers use MarTech when strategizing and creating marketing campaigns.

This is where an Internal Talent Marketplace platform comes in.

How can an Internal Talent Marketplace platform help you with staff retention? As an Internal Talent Marketplace platform, GoFIGR is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform designed to collect and analyse employee skill and career aspiration data so you can supercharge your talent retention and organizational development efforts. Think of it like a CRM for your employee’s careers. With valuable insights collected from your team, GoFIGR allows you to:

• identify your employees’ current skillsets
  
• align them with your business expansion plans
  
• realise your team’s full potential
  
• reduce the cost of recruitment by upskilling from within
  

This way, you can go and FIGR (Find, Inspire, Grow and Retain) talent with data-driven strategies – just like a Marketer would for customers.

Your future team is already working for you.

Don’t let that precious talent go to waste. Instead, give them the opportunity to grow their career AND drive your business into its tomorrow with GoFIGR, your trusted Internal Talent Marketplace platform. It’s the ultimate way to retain staff, foster a progressive internal culture and minimize the costs of repetitive recruitment.

‍Contact GoFIGR today to discover how we can help you to foster a future-focused workforce using our internal talent marketplace.

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