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60-day check-in questions for your new hires

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Are you conducting 60-day check-ins with your new hires? They’re a great opportunity to ensure your new team members are making a good start in your organisation and leverage feedback to improve your processes. Here’s a list of 60-day check-in questions for your new hires, to guide you in your conversations. 

It’s exciting to welcome a great new hire into your organisation to benefit from their skills and experience, and add to your existing teams and culture. You may have already conducted a 30-day check-in. The 60-day mark is another good opportunity to assess their progress and ensure they’re feeling challenged and engaged. 

By understanding if your new team members are meeting their targets and feeling fulfilled in their role, you can provide them with the support and attention they need and deserve, and avoid the negative consequences of needing to rehire. In addition to assessing their performance, take the time to understand and measure their happiness at work and within your culture. You can also use their feedback to improve your employer branding strategies and your onboarding and training process for future hires. 

60-day check-in questions for your new hires

  • What do you like most about your team and our organisation? 
  • Are we meeting your expectations? Is your job what you expected it to be?
  • Have you experienced any issues in meeting your responsibilities? If so, what are they?
  • How did you find your experience coming onboard with us? 
  • Did you have any positive or negative feedback about the process? Is there anything that you recommend we continue doing or change for future hires? 
  • Do you feel confident that your training has set you up for success? 
  • Do you have all the information, tools and resources you require to perform your job well? 
  • Do you feel challenged in your role? 
  • Do you feel fulfilled in your role and want to stay with us? 
  • Do you feel as if you have all the support you need to be successful in this role? Is there anything else we can do to help? 

Conducting 60-day check-ins will ensure your new hires make a great start in your organisation and helps you leverage feedback to improve your processes. Use these catch-ups as opportunities to provide support, understand challenges from their perspective and obtain recommendations for improvement. 

Looking for more advice ways you can improve your employer brand? Have a read of our employer branding guide or call us to speak to a specialist on 1300 366 573.

Retain great talent: Strategies to foster employee loyalty

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When you’re running a recruitment campaign, candidate attraction is most likely at the forefront of your thinking. Don’t let employee retention become an afterthought. Here are three simple strategies to improve employee retention and increase employee loyalty. 

Employee retention isn’t something you start working on during a recruitment campaign or when you’ve hired a candidate. Fostering employee loyalty should be continuous! Retaining great talent is the foundation of organisational success, because after all, you recruit great talent to retain great talent. So, here are three great employee retention strategies you can implement today.

Invest in your teams

Your first thought about investing might be money – but it’s much more than that. It’s also about time. Invest time in developing your teams, using team building to foster teamwork and productivity.

If you already invest time and resources into your existing teams, share this through your recruitment advertisements to attract great candidates. Top talent wants to see how their work may be valued and how they can develop in your organisation.

It’s no wonder that when your teams are disengaged, productivity decreases. Research reveals that 70% of employees aren’t engaged in their roles which creates an estimated cost of $450 billion to $550 billion in lost productivity per year. Investing time into your team will increase productivity and overall work happiness, saving your organisation money and giving you the ability to retain great people

Empower your teams

Empowering your team is a great way to demonstrate trust. According to Forbes, employees who feel empowered or have a level of autonomy within their roles feel more engaged in their jobs than those who do not.

“Employees who felt a low level of empowerment were rated with engagement at the 24th percentile, whereas those with a high level of empowerment were at the 79th percentile. Clearly, empowerment counts.”

So how can you empower your team? Share their successes on your social media channels and provide incentives as a reward for meeting targets.

Sharing how you appreciate their effort and hard work in day-to-day conversations too.

For example, one of your team members may not have performed so well in a quarter. Express that you fully appreciate their efforts and expect they will learn from this result. Offer them support in areas they may need it and consider if any workplace or personal problems may have impacted their results. Great leadership fosters employee loyalty over the long-term. Employees should feel valued and empowered to improve even after a tough conversation about KPIs and results.

Provide excellent leadership and support

Leadership is arguably one of the most important elements of candidate retention. Employees remain loyal to great leaders. Continue to develop and improve your leadership skills, offer support, and understand on a deep level what your employees want from leaders.

In addition to this, consider offering additional support to candidates and new hires too. The recruitment process can be stressful for candidates, so offering your support during the onboarding process and demonstrating great leadership while they navigate their initial few weeks is essential to making a great impression. Continue this support as they become more autonomous in their decision making is vital.

Focusing on these three elements will nurture a positive workplace environment for loyal employees to thrive.

The overarching theme of retention is empowering your people. If your people feel empowered in their role and the organisation, they are more likely to stay loyal to the brand and become advocates. This makes talent attraction much easier over the long term. Investing in your team, building trust and providing support where required will create an empowered and loyal workforce who are in it for the long run.

Schedule a discussion with our Recruitment Specialists, call us on 1300 366 573 or email info@employmentoffice.com.au.

3 ways personality tests improve productivity and retention

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Personality tests are a powerful and effective way to inform your final hiring decision. But instead of considering it as a selection tool, why not consider it as a way to improve productivity and retention too? 

You may be familiar with personality tests, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), which are a great way to gain a deeper understanding of your top shortlisted candidates. While personality tests shouldn’t make or break your hiring decision, they can inform your decision. Personality tests are also a great method of improving productivity and retention by helping you better understand new hires, your current team, the way they think and who they’ll work well with. Here are the benefits you can expect to see by using personality testing as a retention tool. 

1. Improved communication and understanding 

Gaining a better understanding of the way you and your team members think will help you understand the best way to work well together. By becoming aware of the small and major differences in your thought processes, you can identify the best ways to brief them for new tasks or help them overcome shortfalls.

For example, if you are a sensory thinker and your team member is an intuition-based thinker, the way you phrase a brief may affect the way they understand the task.  By using personality insights, you can drastically improve communication in your team, obtain buy-in an increase productivity.

2. Improved work style 

A personality test may reveal you prefer thinking in a “judging manner”, meaning you like to be organised and make a clear plan. On the other hand, you may discover your team member prefers thinking in a “perceiving approach”, that is, big picture thinking, instead of focusing on the smaller details. As a team, this probably means you’ll disagree about strategy and may have to compromise a lot; but understanding their personality and working style can enable you to complement each other’s strengths and work in a style that helps you reach your end goal. 

Understanding people’s preferred way to work will give you a road map on how to accomplish projects and tasks (thus increasing productivity!). 

3. Resolving personality clashes 

Unfortunately, personality clashes between colleagues can drive people out of an organisation. By conducting personality testing, everyone in your team will understand how their way of thinking fits with others, which can improve communication and understanding. This arms you and your team members with the knowledge and skills to reach compromises, diffuse situation, communicate effectively and work well together. 

For more information on how personality testing can improve productive and retention in your organisation, speak to one of our Shortlisting and Selection Specialists today. Call us on 1300 366 573 or email info@employmentoffice.com.au.

Techniques for retention: Rural and remote healthcare

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One of the more difficult healthcare areas to recruit for are those healthcare facilities within rural and remote areas of Australia, so when you’ve successfully recruited, how can you retain?

According to 2019 research conducted by SARRAH for the NSW Ministry of Health; ‘Factors that influence retention are broadly categorised as professional and organisational, social (family and personal), and financial. These are modifiable to varying extent.’ So, there are many factors which broadly influence a person’s decision to remain working within a remote healthcare facility.

Here’s a few ways you can improve employee retention rates in your remote or rural healthcare facility:

Professional and Organisational Factors

  • Provide a professional incentive to remain. Is there any way your organisation can provide the individual with the incentive of professional development through the ability to complete courses relevant to their line of work?
  • Promote and recognise the work the individual is doing. Highlight how they are really making a difference to the community they are within and their commitment to serving others.
  • Provide mentorships and support to the individuals. Rural and remote healthcare facilities have small teams and often the ability to mentor and emotionally support an individual, especially when their work is high-pressured can increase their likelihood of remaining within your organisation.

Social Factors

  • Focusing on family, if the employee has children, is there any way your organisation can support their education or their childcare costs. This will ease the pressures your employee may face when considering their roles impact on their family.
  • Offering incentives that relate to teamwork and team bonding. Your team is likely to be smaller than that of regional facilities. Are there ways you can provide your team with social incentives, such as quarterly team celebrations and/or team day trips out of your rural location.

Financial Factors

  • While housing can often be cheaper than within cities and inner regional Australia, rural and remote areas can be more expensive for general supplies and things like fuel. If your organisation is able to ease these pressures for employees, this may increase retention. This doesn’t need to be monetary; it could be as simple as providing your employees with breakfast each day or subsidising the cost of fuel when travelling to work.
  • Offering monetary incentives such as a yearly review of pay may help your team feel like their work is valued and that you recognise their worth.
  • Non-monetary incentives like flexible working opportunities and the offer of more than the average holiday days without a change in pay, can help your employees be happier with their work life balance (and therefore their work happiness) without affecting their finances.

Need help with your recruitment process?

Speak to our recruitment experts at Employment Office today. We offer recruitment services that help with end-to-end process and can both advise and execute your next recruitment campaign without removing your control of the process. Call us on 1300 366 573 or email info@employmentoffice.com.au today.