We hope you find what you are looking for, if you need any further details please do contact our friendly team!
Companies are facing a great challenge of hiring and keeping the best people as well as reducing overall staff turnover. Can motivational fund days out or team building events help?
Now that corporate Britain is setting its sights on growth again, bosses face the challenge of hiring and keeping the best people – the very people whose enthusiasm and ambition will take company productivity to the next level and shift overall company performance into a higher gear. At the same time, there’s a lot of work still to be done to dispel the lingering uncertainties over job security that have stalked the corridors during these past few lean, recessionary years.
Because of this rejuvenation, motivation is back at the top of the HR agenda. At KDM Events Management, we’re receiving a lot of enquiries for social-style internal events, on top of the purely business-focused activity that has characterised our order book in recent years. We’re already seeing more requests for team events, engagement activities and incentive experiences, as well as a resurgence in demand for family fun days.
But we’re also hearing that some CEOs are pretty dismissive about fun-style corporate activities. They are questioning the benefit of purely social events as a contribution to corporate performance and dismissing them as an unnecessary luxury because the outcomes, and therefore the return on investment from such events, are difficult to quantify.
To KDM, this viewpoint misses the bigger picture. Companies that are committed to raising and sustaining levels of motivation amongst their workforce need to apply a strategic approach to their internal events. It’s absolutely true that a one-off party or anniversary celebration is a blip in the calendar that has the same effect on company-wide motivation as a crash diet has to sustained weight loss. The feel-good factor fades as soon as ‘real life’ returns.
And, as with any other business strategy, the starting point must be a measurable objective. An excellent example of a measurable goal would be reducing overall staff turnover. Experts estimate that it costs around twice an employee’s salary to find and train a replacement, so reducing staff turnover is already a critical goal in all companies.
We’ve been helping some of our clients to devise a calendar of motivational activities – which can include anything from quiz nights to on-site massage sessions. Using current staff turnover figures as a baseline, it’s easy to monitor churn over a period of a year. Further metrics can be supplied from annual employee wellbeing surveys, examining such factors as how valued employees feel, to what degree they are proud to be working for their company, and to what extent they would recommend their employers to job seekers. The statistics enable you to progressively measure the effects of a long-term motivational strategy.
So making staff feel appreciated, recognising the important role that all of our families play in our daily lives, and creating an occasion to thank employees and their loved ones for continued support, turns out to be a sound business investment with measurable return, after all.
