As much as you have sought to make all the accommodations so that your staff can work from home, even so, your remote worker is looking for another job online. The HR departments of all surviving employers are out there raising the bar, offering more perks and benefits to entice your employees to jump ship, and your people are taking notice.
And if you are thinking that your employees are looking forward to returning to the grind of showing up at your office every day to report to work, be forewarned, an overwhelming percentage of your telecommuting employees would gladly take a pay cut for the chance to continue to work from home following the lifting of pandemic restrictions. Remote work is the future.
If you subtract state, federal, and municipal telecommuters from the equation, 80 percent of teleworkers are looking for a better deal online. Your competition knows this, and they are making their intentions known, because if nothing else, the pandemic has alerted your staff that their earning potential is no longer limited by location. They can now work anywhere in the world, while never having to leave their homes.
And for those workers who were restrained to metropolitan living to accommodate their daily commutes to and from work, they are moving away from the hustle and bustle. Why? They are seeking a better life, freedom from the stress and strain of being a part of the rat race, reduction in the cost of living, and to relocate closer to the families they moved away from to seek grand employment opportunities.
This is forcing small businesses who are doing their best to adapt and survive throughout the lingering effects of the coronavirus outbreak to focus on increasing benefits to telecommuting employees to retain the current workforce.
You are going to have to reevaluate your incentives to stay competitive and increase employee retention during these unprecedented times.
Here are some ideas you can up the ante for employee retention:
1. Loosen the Reigns
If you’ve been tracking your remote workers like the Dickens, then you might start thinking about other methods of tracking your employees’ performance while they are working from home. Teleworkers are not fond of thinking they are being micromanaged or spied upon. Other firms who empower their employees to be responsible for themselves in delivering the goods are consistently seeing record-breaking results from their work-from-homers.
2. Health Benefits
Medical insurance is a highly sought perk for telecommuters. For small businesses, this might be too much of a nut to crack, so think about offering health benefits, like health club memberships, or offer to go halfsies on a treadmill they can use to stay fit at home. Be creative.
3. Workspace Assistance
If you could see the conditions that remote workers are working under to deliver the results you are looking for while they are working from home, you might be surprised that they are working in less than complimentary conditions, while perched on the sofa or curled up in bed with their laptop because they do not have an adequate home workspace. You can offer matching incentives or provide your remote workers with a basic workspace set up.
4. Employee Vacations
Many employers offer vacation time where employees earn a percentage of the hours they’ve worked back in hours to be spent while on vacations, but the growing trend is to also offer a stipend incentive to subsidize the actual cost of getting out and taking a vacation, and not just holding up inside your home, and watching TV. Statistics prove that vacationing teleworkers are the most productive and feel more content while they are on-the-clock.
5. Increased Flexibility
If you empower your employees to adjust their hours to their own schedules, they feel a higher degree of affinity with their employers. If you want to keep them, let them make their own schedules and allow them to even undercut their hours and sacrifice a few unpaid hours to tend to personal details. You gain long-term reliability and increased job performance. So, lighten up.
It looks like your staff’s preference is to continue to work from home even after the pandemic restrictions are lifted, so it behooves you to pay attention to this emerging trend of our new normal and start to make accommodations for employee retention.