Retaining employees has always been a priority for our partners, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult amid economic instability, rising costs and more remote-working opportunities. Retaining people retains knowledge, about your services, processes and clients, all of which benefits the business greatly.
Combating the Great Resignation with IT
A quick overview of how the right technology keeps your team engaged and reduces churn, before you dig into the full guide.
Staff turnover raises costs for replacement and retraining, plus productivity and commercial loss in the interim. A less visible impact is the cultural damage of high turnover, lost loyalty and commitment, and further churn. Many companies now treat low staff turnover as a sign of a dependable, reliable business to work with, especially in the service sector.
Surprisingly, IT can greatly affect the employee experience, you can’t afford to ignore it. So how can IT mitigate the impact of high turnover and help turn your business into a place people want to stay?
Employee experience
Employees, especially the younger generation, increasingly value benefits over salary, and the most valuable perks reflect the company’s core beliefs rather than just pounds and pennies. Days off, mental-health days, and flexible hours to support personal commitments all help attract and retain people (and the right setup makes flexibility possible, more on that later).
Encouraging a healthy lifestyle benefits both employer and employee, leading to a happier, healthier workforce with fewer sick days. This can be done through free healthy food and snacks, gym memberships and active-event memberships, even promoting team fitness events that encourage team building outside of work.
A laptop alone isn’t a benefit anymore, but a modern, high-quality device is. Reliable kit removes daily frustration and creates pride in the organisation. Letting employees choose their device (within a few compatible options) becomes a benefit at no extra cost. We recently gave an employee the choice of a new laptop; she chose the Lenovo Yoga Slim and won’t stop showing friends the leather finish, more cost-effective than the model we’d planned, and a bigger win for her.
First impressions, employee onboarding
First impressions matter, and how a new employee is treated in their first days shapes how they view the company, a view that’s hard to change later. A personal, well-planned onboarding (a work buddy, lunches across teams, a clear induction plan) gets people integrated and talking positively about you.
Getting new starters set up on their devices and systems is a big part of onboarding today, and it must be smooth. The good news: automation is readily available. With Microsoft 365 you can ship a device the new starter simply logs into and watches build itself with all their apps. Single sign-on means immediate access without setting up or remembering dozens of passwords. Get this right, a good IT partner (like Sereno!) can build a bespoke, repeatable process, and onboarding becomes effortless.
The right tools for the job
Most companies are now entirely dependent on technology, which frustrates employees if it’s poorly managed. The best people want to be effective and productive; restrict or limit them and they get demotivated. A key frustration is systems that aren’t integrated and need constant manual intervention. Choosing integrated systems, and single sign-on across your apps, streamlines work (most companies now use ~40 apps; imagine logging into each daily).
Automating laborious processes has a huge impact too. Microsoft Power Automate can create quick automations between systems. And off-the-shelf platforms like Microsoft 365 (20+ apps, most barely scratched) keep improving each year, unlike bespoke systems that age, can’t be supported long-term, and create data silos. A couple of real examples from our partners:
- An estate agency started using Microsoft Bookings to schedule viewings, saving each letting and sales employee around two hours a day, plus phone-bill savings.
- A commercial factory adopted Microsoft Shifts to create and share staff shifts, let staff check in on mobile, and track holidays for future planning.
Support when they need it, reliable IT support
The Great Resignation hit IT and tech harder than most, 31% of workers in the IT industry alone looked for new roles during it.
That makes retaining technical staff hard, and, per Wired, it’s also squeezed the IT outsourcing market. Your employees will always need support, however user-friendly your tech. Make it simple, accessible and available: at Sereno we mix technology and customer service, instant access to engineers via live chat, the ability to book engineer time at your convenience, and automated approvals to speed up requests.
Work-life balance, effective remote working
Whether you support remote working or not, it’s impossible to avoid in the post-pandemic world if you want to retain people.
As Forbes reports, remote/flexible working is one of the biggest reasons employees move, for a better work-life balance, less travel, or opportunities outside their local area. The right setup that allows simple access from anywhere attracts talent and improves culture. Supporting a good work-from-home setup can be as simple as a second screen, docking station, keyboard or lumbar support, small costs that make a big difference. At Sereno we build a bespoke “hybrid working” package for your chosen setup.
Face-to-face interaction, creating culture through hybrid working
On the flip side, use IT to encourage people back into the office. In-person interaction builds relationships and supports culture, and hybrid (rather than fully remote) is many companies’ chosen balance. Kitting everyone out with laptops makes it easy to come in, but once there, work must be as comfortable as at home. Standardised laptops plus desks with two monitors and a docking station mean anyone can grab any desk, connect one cable and go, no hunting for adaptors or climbing under desks. We also give all employees a shared-office-space subscription, attracting talent from further afield while encouraging weekly meet-ups, which also lowers our costs and keeps our pricing competitive.
Online community, using an intranet to support culture
More remote and flexible working can leave a workforce feeling dispersed. A centralised intranet helps build community and showcase the support and culture available.
What an intranet can do
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Feedback & recognition
Employee feedback (anonymous or not), plus a “cheers for peers” recognition wall and an employee-of-the-month vote.
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Knowledge in one place
Employee FAQs, internal processes, HR documents and handbooks, all searchable.
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Events & updates
Upcoming social and work events, company-wide performance reporting, and committee updates.
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People & links
Staff bios that build relationships, with quick links through to your other systems.
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Leave & absence
Holiday requests and sickness logging, handled in the same place.
At Sereno we built all of this in SharePoint, which also removed the need for a separate HR platform, an employee-recognition platform and a document-management platform, while linking to other SharePoint sites and being accessible through Microsoft Teams.
Communicate, effective meetings and support
Video meetings substitute for lost in-person interaction and help people feel part of a team, encourage cameras on for engagement. Regular team meetings (even a quick summary of what people are working on) create a support structure, and public recognition encourages loyalty. Email easily causes miscommunication, we’ve all sent one that read as colder than intended, so encourage quick video calls over email, and use status sharing in something like Slack or Microsoft Teams to easily see if someone is busy, on a call, away or available.
People work for people, not companies, so support the development of friendships.
Mobile phone freedom. VoIP phone apps
‘Mobile phone freedom’ is an increasing request: employees resent carrying a separate work phone, using their personal phone for work calls, or having the company control their personal device. A cloud VoIP service gives employees mobile and desktop apps to make and receive business calls with direct dials, no giving out personal numbers, no domestic/abroad call charges. Alternatively, a light-touch Mobile Device Management setup lets employees use business apps on personal phones with security controls applied only to those apps, never the rest of the device.
From Sereno IT
The Sereno IT team
Sereno IT is a London-based managed IT support provider helping businesses across the UK stay secure and productive. Read more in the IT Strategy section.
