Engendering staff loyalty
DM is a young industry but young people only tend to stay in a job for a short period of time before they think the grass could be greener, and more importantly, that they can get more money elsewhere. Many DM agencies are now focusing more efforts on training and developing their staff, as well as introducing innovative reward schemes, to ensure they feel inspired, fulfilled and have real career opportunities without money necessarily coming into the equation. Chris Freeland, client services director at Tullo Marshall Warren (TMW) explains more.
We recognise that it’s impossible to appeal to everyone, but we can be flexible and creative in the way that we make people feel valued. Some staff prefer to be rewarded through training and personal development in order to grow as an individual, while others want tangible rewards for their contribution to the agency. And there’s the challenge of those people who would like both!
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With this mind, the time has come for managers to take responsibility for identifying an individual’s training and development needs and to incorporate this into their annual performance review; agreeing objectives for the individual to grow and develop in their role. If managers feel they don’t have the resources internally to fulfill the development needs, they should look externally to see what initiatves or courses are available.
Many companies are also beginning to see the value that a motivation scheme can bring, and are rewarding their staff accordingly in order to drive retention. This is not only helping to keep good people tied into the company, but it’s also adding to the agency’s bottom line through greater productivity.
Here at TMW, over and above the usual employee benefits, we are striving to offer our staff a range of more attractive benefits to give them a better work/life balance: we’ve negotiated discounts with the local gym as well as selected retailers on the King’s Road, we offer interest free loans for season ticket holders and we’ve also launched a cycle to work scheme, where the cost of a new bike is supplemented to encourage people to get fit. In addition, we run a ‘golden ticket’ scheme every month, which gives everyone the opportunity to enter into a free prize draw to win anything from tickets to the opera to a weekend away in the UK or Europe. This is invaluable for the individual if they are to develop a greater sense of loyalty to the business and for the business to be seen to be investing in valuable resources
Finally, for the last two years, we have been running a graduate training scheme, which offers ‘the stars of tomorrow’ a formal comprehensive training programme. The scheme has paid dividends and we have hired some fantastic new recruits as a result of the scheme. We are now looking to further implement a more rigorous programme this year giving graduates the opportunity to work in different departments for a number of weeks in order to give them a real flavour of agency life, not only to improve their understanding of DM but to help them decide on the area that best suits their skills.
Extending flexible benefits to staff is likely to be a key driver in creating a happy workforce, ultimately having a significant impact on retention in the longer term.
