Decades of experience assisting firms successfully meet their staffing needs and provides consulting services to clients both in Direct Placements and Contract Staffing.
To combat high employee turnover, small businesses are taking steps to boost employee retention through benefits.More than 163,000 U.S. businesses have closed since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the last Yelp Economic Average report.
Over 1,000 small business owners revealed a 20% uptick in turnover rates over the past 12 months, according to a new survey from Principal Financial Group.
Almost all believe the pandemic impacted the turnover.Benefits are one way to recruit and retain top talent, yet small businesses often avoid offering employee benefits due to the cost.
When considering employee benefits, small businesses rank affordability (50%) and their ability to attract and retain employees (42%) as most important, according to the Principal Financial Group survey.“It’s encouraging to hear from so many business owners who are taking the time to better understand why their employees are leaving so they can proactively address these concerns for current and prospective workers,” Mark West, national vice president of business solutions for Principal, said in a release.
“We’re committed to working with employers to ensure we have benefit offerings that are targeted to their employee needs, especially as they evolve in the wake of COVID-19.”More than half of the small business owners served by Principal say they want to reward their key employees with more benefits.
Seventy-four percent have a plan in place to add voluntary benefits and 59% plan to add qualified retirement plans, according to the Principal data.Financial wellness benefits and HR and legal services are also in demand among small businesses.
Keep in mind that no assessment—including this one—will ever provide the ultimate answer to the question “What should I do next?” Instead, this exercise will give you data to consider and incorporate with all of the other data that you are collecting that may highlight certain themes for you to explore further in determining what might be next for you.
The more responses you have, the more likely common themes will emerge.
To be clear, I am not advocating letting other people decide your professional path for you—in fact, you want to stay away from what my colleagues and I call “the should’s.” For example, “My parents say I should find something more stable than a startup,” or “I got a law degree, so I should really do something in the legal field since I spent all that money on law school.” Feedback from others can be helpful since they are likely more to be objective in identifying your gifts and talents that you have either taken for granted or have a blindspot around and don’t recognize the extent to which you are really good at something in particular, whether that’s communication, creativity, or coaching others.
Likewise, if the adjectives are along the lines of “caring, compassionate, and helpful,” perhaps something in the helping professions like teaching, medicine, counseling, or coaching would play to your strengths.
For example, someone once told me that I was a risk-taker.
They responded with actions or decisions I had made that I had never thought of as risky, because they were things that I wanted to do.