We know tender time can be risky when it comes to staff retention, with employees feeling anxious about their future prospects and, often, it is the most proactive high-performing Employment Consultants (ECs) that jump ship early to another provider/contract/discipline (NDIS for example). Our Board Advisor, James Weait, has shared 5 practical tips below to help you mitigate this risk as we enter January 2024.
- Be clear on your service design selling points as a provider: ECs often have their head turned by an increase in salary without considering whether a new role will also be an increase in caseload/administrative burden. Share what you can, when you can with regards to service design, it may be your proposed salary is slightly less competitive, but you have a central contact centre and sales team to support ECs to be successful.
- Consider additional benefits: What is available to you for the new contract? Is it time to consider salary packaging if that is an option? Review and compare publicly available Enterprise Agreements to your own offer. Could you consider flexible working for your staff with a 4-day week, slightly longer days and cover from corporate staff? What might be the operational benefits of that, for focused PPS time for example? Anecdotally, the most significant transition of high-performing, experienced staff out of the employment service industry appears to be into self-employed NDIS Support Coordinator roles. Support Business Managers with both the benefits of working within a structured environment and any statistics on the disproportionate volume of Coordinators in the area currently.
- Consider flexing your KPIs or goals over this period: Look at prior tender lead-in times for your company and whether performance has held up when staff have had to cover (sometimes dwindling) caseloads. Could KPIs be flexed to be proportionate to caseload size to keep staff morale over this period and avoid burn out? Could team goals be trialed if they haven’t already to achieve the same objective?
- Involve valued frontline staff in the tender process: Can they engage local community partners, employers for you? Can they collate testimonials? Can they provide first drafts for answers, or be part of steering groups for the service design and/or anticipated roll out of the new contract? All the above will be very empowering activity that engenders loyalty and serves as valuable succession planning activity.
- Make sure managers are leading their staff: Check whether managers are accepting resignations without asking, Is there anything we can do? Or, Have you considered this? Sometimes service design/additional benefits are not enough and, in such moments, a manager asking the question has at least reinforced how valued the staff member has been and ended the relationship on good terms. Equally important is how the last day of an exiting employee is handled. At tender time managers can be stretched thinner than ever, but it is still important to acknowledge the contribution the exiting employee has made in front of their colleagues. Failing to do this undermines organisational culture and, more often than not, has remaining staff considering how valued their work really is and whether they should consider leaving too.
If you are considering building your tender team, or wish to drive performance for the last year of the DES contract and need additional resources, please each out to Samantha Smith on 0405 248 406.
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