“Focus On Retaining Employees, Not Just Hiring New Ones” w/ Marc Z of Marc Z Legal Staffing

Nathan (1s):
Welcome back Radio Entrepreneurs listeners and fans, I’m producer Nathan Gobes excited to reintroduce you to one of our regular reporters, Marc Z of Marc Z Legal Staffing. He’s here with another employment update for his Marc Z moment. Welcome Marc.

Marc (17s):
Thanks Nathan. Great to be here and talk about some relevant subjects.

Nathan (22s):
I know you do always have a relevant topic and this one I know, relates to an issue that many employees or employers are dealing with. Why don’t you tell us what you want to talk about?

Marc (32s):
Thank you, Nathan. So as you and I were talking about one of the things in this economy, everybody is saying the green resignation, every a lot of employers in many areas or in many areas, not only in specialty areas and industries and everywhere around the country are having problems with hiring good, talented people. And they’re doing everything they can to hire talented people, increasing salaries, signing bonuses. Some, some employers are letting new employees have specially designed vacations, letting them work remotely, partially remotely really design their own jobs sometimes.

Marc (1m 20s):
But what a lot of employers are not looking at which some employers are. And I think that a, a magnifying glass is coming in more of retaining employees. One of the thing of one of the, the, the feedback, and I said, one of the things coming from the hiring the last few years of COVID is once the hiring is completed and the person is onboarded, a lot of employers just expect the person to be integrated to their systems, the way of doing things, their culture. And the problem is, is especially with a lot of these employers, having remote employees or letting their employees work full-time remote or part-time remote.

Marc (2m 7s):
And having training coming, coming in training is not always best when you do it from remote and also the mentorship or the whole follow-up or the whole process of communication is very, very difficult. And so what we want to talk about and just remind employers when you’ve made a considerable considerable investment in hiring a new employee, when you want to do is retain that employee. Now there’s two types of retain retention. One is with your new hires. Obviously once you’ve hired them, you want to make sure they have the training.

Marc (2m 49s):
They feel part of the process. Part of the culture really start a good working relationship with their colleagues. And you have to put a whole process in place and you have to put a training in place for the people that did the training in the office. It’s not the same anymore. The, the people that might, they might have been the buddies to the, or the mentors to some of the new people coming in, they may not be accessible anymore. Like they were, they may not be downloadable anymore. And just in terms of getting back to them and when you’re, when you’re new, even if you’re the best employee that figures things out on their own, they still have questions in order to do the job.

Marc (3m 39s):
And a lot of times it’s difficult to reach the key people because they’re not trained yet. They don’t know what happens. So what happens is you have people leaving jobs because the, the people that reported the reporting to are not getting back to them, they’re not getting the training. They’re not, they’re not learning the job. And in some cases on the employer side, the employers feel that they should have, it should have been doing a better job. And so the employers are, are letting people go where the, the employers are not doing the type of, of hire. So, so there is a balance once you’ve vetted somebody, once you’ve referenced somebody, once they’ve gone through the whole process and they’ve come on, you’ve made an investment to bring that person there and you want to do everything in your power to retain them.

Marc (4m 31s):
And so, again, our suggestion is one, try to have a design training program when the person comes in. So they’re oriented properly, try to have people. Now it’s been two years that understand the new model. Maybe the person can come in for a day or two, and then everything else is done remotely, but have a program where everybody is invested in. And, and, and also you want particularly early in that stage, not just throw somebody into the deep end, but you want to help guide them, you know, have a, have a lifeguard there. That’s gonna help make sure that every step they take or every swim stroke, they, they embark on they’re hitting the right marks where they’re, they’re happy in your Abby.

Nathan (5m 26s):
Yeah. I think that’s a great analogy, mark. You know, like you said, these employers, can’t just assume that once the new hire signs, the paperwork and, you know, gets their password, that they’re all set to, to rock and roll. It’s totally different world out there than it was several years ago, where, like you said, everyone, new hires had, you know, people down the hall they could ask, you know, they had other coworkers in the lunch room, whatever people that they could on hands that they could reach out to now, it’s, it’s much more difficult. And I think a lot of employees find that, you know, they, they don’t feel as comfortable reaching out, especially when they’re new, you know, they don’t know when it’s acceptable to, to reach out and ask for questions, you know, is this a good question to ask, you know, things like that.

Nathan (6m 10s):
So it is so helpful, so crucial to have a system and some training in place. And like you said, probably training that that may need to be updated if it hasn’t been since the pandemic, you know, a lot of, a lot of companies have adopted new digital systems, new ways of managing things in this remote environment. And these new hires need to be trained in that manner. Not in, not necessarily just in the old, the old ways that we were doing things to two and a half years ago.

Marc (6m 41s):
Correct. And even the other thing is that I also want to let our listeners know, don’t forget your existing staff, because you bring on people, you know, you’ve, you financially compensated. A lot of these people may be traditionally a lot more. You want your existing team to be helpful, to feel good about everybody coming in and being helpful to the new people, but feeling good about themselves in your company. It’s like, you know, I don’t know about you. I can’t remember, but it’s like when you had siblings and I, we always see it with friends of ours and they, you know, you have one child and then the baby comes in.

Marc (7m 26s):
And a lot of times people looking for the, the child that they’ve had, and they don’t have, not that they ignore them, but they’re so focused on the baby that they don’t give them the attention. And that’s the same thing with the, the existing employee. You have been very pleased with this person who’s been with your company. You know, you’ve tried to be fair with them. Compensation-wise responsibility, Roadtrek wise, but all of a sudden you’re focused on the hiring because you really have these needs, but you really want to make sure they’re happy. You know, whether it’s, if you’re going to give more money to somebody coming in now to do, to do the role and, and handle the responsibility, what a lot of firms are doing is unilaterally.

Marc (8m 13s):
They’re saying, you know what, this is what salaries are right now. We want this, we want our team to be happening. And so anybody coming in, we’re going to put on this new compensation, but the people that were on the old one, we want to make sure that they’re fairly balanced. We want to make sure that they have the, the new bonus incentive package that we’re giving people coming in. So they feel good that it is safe when win-win situation.

Nathan (8m 41s):
That makes total sense, mark, you know, you spend all this time and money filling these holes that, you know, may have filled in, in many, many employers teams. But if you don’t take care of the current employees that are still there, you’re gonna end up with more holes that have to be filled. And I think, you know, back to what we were talking about with training, it’s it, you know, even though we are two years into it, it is entirely possible that some of these, you know, if you’re ramping up a new, a new training program for new hires, you may want to think about the old employees too, and, and either mandatory or not, but, you know, have them get freshened up on, on all these systems, you know, maybe people are doing what they can to, to get along, but they could use some, some help, some communication from the team.

Marc (9m 25s):
Correct? Correct. So that’s, you know, that’s my process that I thought of really important to our listeners. Nathan is just, you know, remember once you’ve done the hire and completed the hire and you have people coming on the process doesn’t end there. And then once you have people coming on board and you want them to be successful, you want to maintain your team and make sure they’re happy. So that way everybody’s happy. And you have the successful team.

Nathan (9m 57s):
Oh, great. Well, we’re always happy when you’re here with us mark and we love having you join us every week for any of our listeners or viewers that want to get in touch with you. Maybe they have a staffing needs that they need to fill, or they just have questions. What’s the best way to find you?

Marc (10m 13s):
Sure. Nathan. Well, first of all, just Google, Marc Z MIRC and the letter Z and we’ll come right up or Marc Z Legal, M a R C Z L E G a l.com or 6 1 7 3 3 8 1 300.

Nathan (10m 27s):
Great. And of course you can find mark C on the Radio Entrepreneurs website. He’s always got some relevant discussion topics that we’re presenting there and we’re all over social media and on many other platforms as well. YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Facebook, LinkedIn, you name it. We’re probably there. So be sure to follow us on all those. We’ll be back with Radio Entrepreneurs after this break.