Avoiding Losing the Best of your Best….What you CAN do…

Right now you are at risk of losing the best of your best. Your shining stars that keep the show on the road, you may have had no choice but to either put them on reduced hours or on short term layoff. What can YOU do about this? The answer lies in RELATIONSHIPS & CONNECTION, the entire foundation of your business.

What I would like to focus on in this blog is how to keep connected to these Employees right now. This is an area where I feel I can share with you the key aspects of what I have learned over my experience of advising Employers and of course of being an employee myself! I know there have been 100’s of emails circulating all offering good advice, but if you are like me you will get overwhelmed by this information overload and need something in a more summarised version which feels more manageable to tackle. This blog is intended to be an example of such a summary.

Anyway, as I said what I am going to specifically focus on are critical groups for you right now, your high potential Employees that you had no choice but to place on reduced hours or possibly on short term layoff. “High potentials” is simply the term that we use in HR for these shining stars.

You need to maintain these Relationships, yes they are different but they have not disappeared. An essential ingredient for any relationship as we know is a sense of connection, the word I mentioned at the start of this blog. We need to feel CONNECTED to those we want to connect with and indeed those we feel we “should” be connecting with. So, for example an employee is likely to really want to connect with their friends, but this doesn’t directly translate into their “wants” around their Employer. However, they do know they “should” be connected to their Employer if I am making sense here. Within our sense of connection also remember that we expect that that we CAN get in contact if we need to (and how we can do this), it’s enough to know that the option is always available to us and it’s really important that we know this.

Bottom line CONNECTION is fundamental so how can you do this right now with your Employees?

You are at risk of losing them to another Employer, another industry. Of course, as we all know there will be certain Employees who you mightn’t be too concerned about, let’s say you might even be relieved if they find something else. From the employee’s perspective they too might be relieved who knows but that’s a win:win when both sides are relieved isn’t it?

Back to How to Stay Connected With High Potential Employees on Reduced Hours

Of course you need to strike the balance between supporting people as much as you can but also not crossing any boundaries and really what I mean are legal boundaries. The tendency might be to leave the “rule book” go out the window in times like this but I really caution against that. Try to find ways to be of support but stay within the guidelines, not to mention the very tempting elephant in the room “cash in hand”. It might be fine for now but if anything goes wrong in the future as an Employer you can be on dangerous ground.

So, what are the practical steps you CAN take to be of support?

• Encourage employees to stay in open contact with the Department of Social Protection
• Quickly organise a letter for the Employee that they can use when talking to their bank, landlord, utility companies etc. to explain their current work situation (don’t cause extra steps or extra unnecessary waiting, be proactive and give them this as soon as you can).
• Have they applied for EVERY single entitlement they are entitled to right now? Including things like the medical card?
• Can they do something very practical like a tax return that we never think of for items such as bin charges, medical & dental expense etc?

How to Stay Connected with High Potential Employees on Short Term Lay Off

You are likely to have invested significant time and perhaps resources in these employees and you don’t want to lose this investment i.e. you don’t want to lose them to other Employers! And of course you also want to do the right thing and genuinely support them in a way that is impactful.

So how can you stay connected with this group at the moment:

The tips above for supporting Employees on reduced hours are all helpful plus any of these steps

• Continue to provide access to any services that you are paying for “anyway” that you can make available to these employees, examples may include:
• any online training packages that Employees normally have access to
• access to any preferential rates/discounts that Employees normally have (eg. 20% reduction in joining rates for a particular networking group, access to contacting Cork Chamber of Commerce for any advice they can offer for example training options as they run a wide range of Skillnet Courses and organisations who are members are entitled to either discounts or funding etc.) Therefore these employees could avail of those benefits also…
• access to advisory services that Employees typically have (Financial Advice would be a high priority naturally and you might have other Advisors that you pay retainers to that you could make available to this group, another example might be the Company Accountant who could help the employee with something very practical like designing a new weekly budget to best use any finances with less income)
• Consider suggesting that these Employees keep in touch with each other, facilitate the idea of a “peer support” structure, this could take any format that works for them and again you aren’t telling adults to do something but suggesting that something like this could be supportive
• Ensure that they have your most up to date contact details and your availability, i.e. when are you around or not around for any potential queries or help they may need
• Perhaps a weekly email with good news stories from the business plus office news; birthdays etc.
• Ask them is there anything else you can do to be of help? Something as basic as clearing out the old shelves in the office stationery press to give them a much needed stationery supply to keep any children at home occupied with colouring and drawing who knows!

Based on my own experience any of the above steps can be helpful. Just to go back to the Financial Advice piece as that is obviously very urgent. It’s likely you have a Company you might deal with in this area already for your PRSA scheme, I just wanted to flag to you that I find Castle Capital Financial Planning really supportive. They have a very strong values focus that really works for clients that I refer to them for their support. If you get a minute check out https://castle-capital-financial-planning.business.site/ they have already helped some of my clients to organise mortgage breaks and more affordable life assurance to give these Employees some breathing space for the moment.

Indeed from a realistic point of view you might do all of the above and these guys might go to another Employer anyway, at least if this DOES happen you WILL know that you did everything within your control to keep them working with your Company and indeed people do return also, return to good Employers who have looked after them, far away fields are definitely not always greener!

Finally your Employees may be still working in your business in critical roles, or they may have been off on leave when the pandemic started (eg. Sick leave, maternity leave etc.) or worst-case scenario in this context you may have had to leave an Employee go i.e. they lost their job with your company. We will talk about these groups next time.

I’ll write again in the coming days, Avril