In this current job market, we have had a number of clients who have experienced this issue and so thought it would be useful to provide some tips on this side….
There are two types of solution to this. The legal route and the employee focused route. Lets have a look at each one in turn.
1 The legal solutions mainly involve ensuring that you have these clauses in your contracts of employment, also know as post-termination restrictive covenants,
- Restraining your employee from engaging in work for your competitor in a particular geographic area and for a particular period;
- Restraining a former employee from disclosing confidential information after the expiry of the employment relationship; and
- Restricting an employee from poaching any other employee to work with your competitor ie: non solicitation
- Garden Leave: You can also direct your employee to go on ‘leave’ during their period of notice. …
Arguably, even when an employer has these in their contracts unless they are written specifically, especially the first three points, then these can often be difficult to uphold in court. Even where they can be, the reality is, this route can be both expensive and time consuming to enforce and an employer would need to have water tight evidence of such breaches of contract.
2 The employee focused solutions. Even by using the term ‘poaching’ we infer that an employee is the ‘company’s property’ that a competitor is attempting to take. It is good to remember that actually employees are employed on a free-will basis and sometimes a person just wants to move on. In addition, in almost every case of employee “poaching”, the departing employee was probably considering leaving —or at the very least had no strong desire to stay. Competitor companies can make enticing offers with great compensation, better benefits, or an impressive title, but if the employee is truly engaged at the company, they will be less likely to seriously consider these offers.
Nb – If you wait until the employee has another offer, then this is too late to act as invariably they will have psychologically made the decision to leave your business.
So what as an employer can you do ?
Whilst some might seem quite obvious there are some extra tools an employer could consider too.
- Look at your Reward package and make sure it is fair. We know it’s an obvious one but keep an eye on what people are being paid in your local job market.
However you will also need to be creative with the benefits being offered and make sure people are aware of them. For example a couple of companies we work with give staff between Christmas and New Year off in addition to their annual leave ie; they have a Christmas shutdown. However really these extra days – normally circa 3 should be added into people’ s holiday entitlement formally so they know they have 23 days per year for example.
You could also do something more creative like allow employees to buy / sell holiday each year ie: give them flexibility with benefits. At different times in an employee’s life they will have different requirements but you could allow employees to ‘Buy’ or ‘Sell’ some of their annual leave so long as they have 28 (inc bank holidays) as a legal minimum. When staff feel like they have more flexibility and control they become more engaged. For some people they will prefer the money and for others they will prefer being able to buy 5 days for example.
If the business can’t afford salary increases you can perhaps give extra holiday for a temporary period of time ie: 1-2 years. In this way you are not adding a direct cost to the business, but the employee gets a benefit. This would need to be drafted properly in your contract.
Could they work more flexibly or could adapt working times so for example you leave at 4pm on a Friday ? or even teams take it in turns to go home half a day or early on a Friday.
Can you look at other benefit schemes that are tax efficient and again that do not cost anything such as salary sacrifice schemes eg: salary sacrifice on electric cars (no cost to employer but just needs setting up).
2 Ask questions and listen to your employees, then take action. Acknowledge the company’s weaknesses but be sure to highlight the strengths too. If you have an employee who has left and they have close contacts in the business, make a concerted effort to sit with the ‘Remainers’ individually and ask them if they are looking too. Be open and honest with them – explain it’s not from a point of trying to catch them out but you genuinely just want to understand exactly what issues are really bothering them and see if you can fix some of them or at least attempt to. Generally speaking when employees leave one company for another they just have a different set of problems – reminding them of some of the positives can be critical and may sway some.
Quite often people leave a ‘bad manager’ so perhaps some feedback and training and development to this person can help.
3 Create a career plan – if someone can see a proper career plan for themselves then it is hard for them to walk away without seeing it through. Do you know what each of your employee’s career aspirations are ? You don’t have to create jobs for people but if they feel like they are being looked after they will be more inclined to stay.
4 Ramp up Training – the way recruiters / competitors who are offering these jobs work, is that they work on the pain points of the current company – the more disengaged they feel the easier to leave. Training and mentoring is a great way to engage staff. As a minimum you should look to provide a yearly education benefit for employees.
They don’t have to be courses that cost a lot – you probably have a lot of knowledge within your business. Can you set-up programmes or “lunch and learns” with a paid lunch – so people learn ‘how to XXXXXXX ’ or ask employees what would they want ? Maybe work shadowing on client appointments or different options can be considered.
Apprenticeships can be given to senior level people at a really reasonable cost i.e.: degree level outcomes but not at degree level costs. They tend to be more cost effective .
Additional tools that you can use to look at engagement and talent management.
Employee engagement survey – rather than looking at this annually as a lot of companies do –maybe run them monthly so you can really start to gauge where you have highly engaged employees and where you don’t. This then gives you the opportunity to address these areas and come up with more specific solutions around job satisfaction / wellbeing / balance / relationships / engagement etc. There is some really great cost effective software on the market from £1 / employee / month that will give you on an online platform to gather this information.
Talent management – 9 box grid. The nine-box performance grid is an assessment tool used by managers to evaluate employee performance and growth potential. The grid helps you visualize the strengths and weaknesses of your company’s talent.
My advice would be if you think it’s expensive doing any of these initiatives then try carrying on with current turnover levels to your competitors. High staff turnover can have huge direct and indirect costs. However that is a blog for another day.
If you would like further details on anything mentioned in here please do not hesitate to get in touch [email protected]
