Speaker 1: Do you struggle with retaining your top talent? In this video we'll uncover the four powerful strategies to boost your team's retention, plus one simple trick that can make the biggest difference in your team. Hi, I'm Mike Bander, co-founder of waybook.com. High employee turnover can be devastating for our businesses, costing us up to 200% of an employee's annual salary to find and train a replacement. But today we're going to tackle this issue head-on with four actionable strategies for retaining your employees, plus a bonus tip that can totally transform your workplace. So let's explore the GROW model adapted for optimal employee retention. G-R-O-W, let's go. First up we have goal clarity. Setting clear organisation and individual goals is crucial. I must admit I was personally a little bit of a late bloomer when it came to clarifying goals in our businesses, but I can tell you firsthand that transforming a chaotic goal-setting process into a structured system is insanely powerful. Enabling your team to know exactly what they're aiming for, productivity can truly soar. A clear goal-setting process not only helps our employees understand what is expected of them, but it also provides a sense of purpose and direction. This is essential for motivation and engagement. Now as a business owner you'll likely personally already have a pretty clear vision of what those goals are, but the question is, are they centralised? Are they shared? And crucially, are they actually aligned to your individual's activities? Now this clarity isn't just useful for your team, but it also helps us as business owners in our hiring processes and also aligning our resources for better management and making sure the business is heading in the direction that we want it to. So imagine you're running your marketing team. I'm sure you have these specific goals that you set for each campaign with tracking the progress and adjusting the strategies based on the real-time data, and you've probably seen already that you can significantly improve your team's performance. Now you can achieve this for your whole business, and tools like Waybook can help you set clear goals and manage complex workflows, ensuring that everybody is aligned, moving in the same direction, which is of course the first talent of boosting retention. As a top tip, try to regularly review and adjust these goals to ensure that they remain relevant and challenging for each of your individual. This keeps your team engaged and striving for excellence and also makes it much more satisfying and enjoyable for them. Roll up for the R. Let's talk about role clarity. Now without a clearly defined role, employees may feel a little bit lost, a little bit unproductive, but when roles and responsibilities are well defined, everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing and crucially how that actually contributes into the rest of the team. In a recent report by Effectory, employees who experience role clarity are 53% more efficient and 27% more effective at work than employees who have role ambiguity. They knew exactly what was expected of them and also how their work contributed to the company's success. And 75% of employees with high role clarity are significantly more passionate about their job. They report higher levels of job satisfaction, which as I'm sure you can guess, it always leads to retention. Now as a top tip here, regularly update your role descriptions to reflect the changes in responsibilities and in company structure. And this essentially ensures that everybody remains on the same page and you can also adapt to the new challenges as the business grows. Plus one thing I love to do is feel free to share everybody else's job roles with everybody else because it helps them map off these handoff periods for projects and also ways of collaborating. Now we've got clarity on your goals and you've got clarity on your roles. Our third strategy is providing opportunities for growth. Continuous learning and career development are vital in keeping your team engaged and motivated. While this can sometimes be harder to map out in smaller businesses with less layers of progression, aligning your team growth to the direction of the business and also offer them regular training sessions around the core challenges of the businesses as it changed not only keeps your team future focused, but it also means that they're action ready as the needs of the businesses develop beyond their current skill sets. Employees that feel valued and can see the company investing in the future makes them way more likely to stay. Weibook can help you create structured learning pathways, adding tests and quizzes and tracking progress on your existing knowledge which supports your team's career development and also puts you in the driving seat. It's not only improving their skills but also boosting their confidence and of course their job satisfaction means that they're more likely to retain. For example if you consider a customer service team by offering regular training on communication tools, on conflict resolution, on product updates, you can ensure that your team remains both knowledgeable and effective. But I get it, sometimes you don't have the time, the knowledge, the resource, the ability to create all of these new trainings and if that is the case for you then you can just simply enable cross-training which is essentially just sharing insights and other people's roles between the different departments. It's such an easy way of upskilling with minimal resource. Now the top tip here is to encourage employees to set their own personal development goals as well as their business goals and crucially provide them with the resources to help them achieve it and this basically shows in a really easy way that you're invested in their personal and professional development. Now if you've got any other tricks up your sleeve in supporting employee training in your business please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. And now for the W, let's discuss work environment. It's more specifically about creating a positive work environment. Now a collaborative and supportive work environment significantly impacts retention. Without it employees may feel isolated, disconnected and also just lack a bit of care about what you and the business are doing. If you've ever had the pleasure of working in a somewhat toxic work environment then you will know the toll it can take. Sacking up all of the energy into places that literally provide no value. But on the flip side working in a company that fosters a positive work environment more often than not reports in employee satisfaction skyrocketing. And whether you have a remote team or an office-based team just think about how you can live your values and can exercise your culture to create this positive and collaborative environment. Try organizing team building activities, encourage open communication and recognizing achievements. A small thing that goes a really long way. These all help build a sense of community and belonging within our businesses. When we were first scaling our original business Hopper HQ we actually had a wall of champagne bottles each of which with an individual tag stating a goal. These goals range from revenue milestones to some of the personal challenges that our team were going through. And whenever we hit a goal the business would pause celebrate the progress before just jumping into the next one. It really created an amazing culture. And now for the bonus tip. The ultimate of employee retention. If I asked you what is the number one reason why people stay with their current team what would you say? Nope. It's not remuneration, it's not flexibility, it's not even impact. The number one reason why employees stay loyal to their current business is having a friend at work. Now while we can't all be our team's best friends ourselves we can certainly create an environment that supports and develops friendships at work. So this is very much aligned to creating a positive work environment. We can invest in areas where true friendships can develop. While the Weibook team is very friendly across the board there are also smaller clusters of very good friends formed both whilst at work building Weibook and existing friends who've recommended to their friends to join the team. It is a true superpower that can be easily unlocked again by creating team building activities, social events, cross-department collaborations all to help build those all-important connections. By encouraging these relationships you're not just creating a pleasant work environment but you're also enhancing your team's overall performance and of course their retention. If employee retention is on your mind then check out Weibook to create a single source of truth for your team because great onboarding, great training and exceptional knowledge management really is in the heart of all of these employee retention strategies. And remember set clear goals, define clear roles, create opportunities for growth, foster a positive work environment and support those workplace friendships. Thank you for watching and until next time keep optimizing, keep innovating and I hope you enjoy some smooth scaling.