In the wake of the Great Resignation, investing in your employees is now more important than ever. If your team members aren’t engaged with their work, then they’ll likely look elsewhere for employment, leaving you high and dry when they give you their notice.
By taking an active approach to employee engagement, incentivizing optimal performance, and creating opportunities for advancement, you can ensure that your best team members stick around for the long haul.
Analyze the Current Situation
For leadership, it’s often difficult to accurately gauge employee satisfaction. Even if team members are struggling with certain components of their work life, they might not feel comfortable raising concerns with their superiors.
Because of this, funeral directors and managers should develop a system for regularly collecting feedback from staff. Through this process, leadership will be able to get a clearer sense of how employees perceive their working conditions. Perhaps some team members feel overworked, while others crave additional challenges and responsibilities.
The feedback you collect from employees during 1:1 meetings, employee satisfaction meetings, and employee reviews will help inform you on any changes you decide to make to your workflow, operational structure, and employee benefits.
Invest in Your People
Studies consistently show that workplaces that offer employee training programs have higher retention rates. Because of this, funeral managers should sit down with each of their employees and help them chart out a career path within the workplace.
By developing these career paths, leaders can gain a greater understanding of their team members’ various interests, skills, and desires, ultimately learning how each team member can continue to grow in the workplace.
From there, leadership can devise various educational means to help these team members acquire new skills, whether this be on-the-job training or tuition reimbursement for outside courses or certifications. When your team members acquire new skills, they can bring these skills back to your business and drive additional revenue growth.
Training and career development doesn’t just apply to your employees. Investing in leadership and management training can help your leadership team foster a supportive and productive environment for the rest of your employees.
Offer Incentives
Another way to improve employee engagement is through the use of incentive compensation plans. This strategy rewards employees with additional compensation when your funeral home achieves certain financial and customer satisfaction goals.
For example, many companies will reward employees with quarterly bonuses that are tied to the overall profitability of the enterprise. This creates greater stakes for each individual to ensure the success of the business.
Still even more effective, however, are individualized employee incentive programs. Particularly for sales and client-facing roles, offering commission or bonus structures on an individual basis can help stir up some extra ambition and reward high performance. For example, if a person receives a bonus for meeting certain sales and customer service metrics, then they’ll be more likely to shoot for this number.
That said, you’ll want to be sure that incentive programs are fair, consistent, and easy to understand. When implemented hastily, employee incentive programs can be gamed, or they can lead to inter-employee competition that ultimately hurts your business.
Bring Strategic Incentives and Engagement to Your Business
In order to create a successful incentive compensation program, you’ll need to consider the goals of your funeral home, as well as the culture of your team. While these programs can spur optimal performance, unattainable goals can just as easily discourage or frustrate your team.
To ensure that your incentive compensation plan — as well as other employee engagement measures — go off without a hitch, you should call in some outside expert help.
At Johnson Consulting Group, we specialize in helping death care businesses of any size adapt to the changing landscape of employee engagements. By partnering with our team, our consultants can help you develop a holistic employee engagement program tailored to the specific needs of your organization. We also offer leadership and management training to help your best workers gain new skills and contribute further to your business.
These days, workers are more selective than ever when it comes to employment. By offering a workplace that engages them and provides the tools to advance their careers, you can attract and retain the best talent in the business. Get in touch today to learn more about how we can help you create an engaging and successful environment for your team.
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