In new construction, HR departments face issues such as shortage of both construction and professional staff. Many people left the new home building industry in 2008, and when the market stabilized and started growing again, new home builders faced a labor shortage. This kind of environment makes it essential to retain top talent. Everyone knows it’s far more cost-effective to retain great employees than to have to train new ones.
So, what are new home builders doing today to retain their top talent? Take a look at some of the best strategies that will ensure you retain your most qualified in-house talent.
1. Maintaining Overall Job Satisfaction
To create teams who want to remain in a high performing setting and work together, you need to employ staff with both technical and interpersonal skills in mind. The job demand is high, so people employed in construction are not as worried about their job security as they were six years ago. However, that doesn’t mean everyone feels secure about their job. Most employees in today’s market will talk to a Recruiter if they call. You need to provide a good work-life balance, competitive benefits, and healthy team environment to make your staff confident and satisfied with their connection to your company.
2. Provide a Clear Career Path
Unlike passive employees (those satisfied with their current job position), active employees will seek growth opportunities. In other words, they want to see whether there’s room for career advancement. Talk to them about their career plans or goals and create career paths and individual development plans. You need to know where your employees want to go and find ways to help facilitate that growth.
3. Build a Feedback Culture
Millennials don’t want to spend their working life in a company that is organized top-down. Today it is about clear communication and building and nurturing quality relationships. Be sure to provide honest feedback but also ask for it. It will allow your employees to feel like they’re an integral part of your team and that their opinion matters. Reach out to them for ideas, engage them to help you with initiatives, and you will earn their trust and energy.
4. Empower Your Employees to Succeed
As a leader, you need to find the perfect balance between being the leader and having confidence in your staff to meet and exceed your expectations. With strict timelines and budgets, frequent changes, and many moving parts, this is very difficult. No one likes to be micromanaged, but you can’t avoid it entirely and leave everything unsupervised. Have the protocols in place but also empower and motivate your team to succeed.
5. Praise and Reward
Don’t focus on praising only those who show the best results. In that case, other employees will easily get demotivated and stop giving their best. Give competitive salaries, have your incentives in check, and provide non-cash rewards. Throw a small party, take employees to lunch, or take them for a team building activity.
The construction job market is tight, so you need to be creative and think outside the box to retain your top talent. Competitive benefits and salaries are always among the key factors, but there’s more you can do to inspire employees to stay connected to your brand. Think of ways to improve their work-life balance, provide innovative benefits, build trusting relationships, and work to keep your communications clear and authentic.
Check out www.builderpromotions.com for gifts you can brand to reward and recognize employees and teams who consistently meet their goals or contribute to innovation and growth.
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