Once you’ve landed the best candidates for your construction jobs, the focus of your organization should shift to employee retention strategies. As a matter of course, retention should be an ongoing focus for your firm. Losing skilled workers, especially during a labor crisis, will negatively impact your company’s bottom line through lost time, slower project completion, and repeated training. A great way to help with retention is to implement performance-based incentives.

Proven Retention Strategies

Perhaps one of the most effective ways to achieve better employee retention is by creating performance incentives and recognizing the accomplishments of your employees. From treating them to lunch to awarding bonuses, there are a variety of ways of praising employees for completing or exceeding performance goals. Here are some tips to create those incentives for your employees so they will stick around for the long term.

  1. Know Your Audience: Be sure you understand the employees who would receive the incentives. Make sure the incentive is something that would motivate them, not the manager coming up with the incentives. Get to know them and find out what they want. Don’t waste your time coming up with a unique technology bonus if your employee is really not into fancy tech gadgets.
  2. The Goal Should Be a Stretch: A goal is meant to stretch your employees past their usual production level. It should be something that motivates them to go above and beyond what they would have done without the incentive.
  3. The Goal Must Ge Attainable: There’s a difference between ambitious goals and those that are just plain unrealistic. More often than not, setting goals that aren’t achievable will lead to failure.
  4. Incentives Should Be in Line with the Company’s Goals: Any incentive must be in line with company goals. Keeping incentives closely aligned with company goals will help keep everybody on the same page and working together.

Two Reasons Why Incentive Goals Don’t Work

Sometimes incentives don’t have the desired result and the employee’s goals are not met. Here are the two biggest reasons why.

  1. Unrealistic Goals: Setting unrealistic goals can lower morale. There’s a good chance that the right employee will lose the motivation to go above and beyond as soon as they realize the goal is not obtainable. Instead, state your goals using clear language so that their progress can be tracked. Don’t muddy the water with too many goals at once, and make sure that your team has all of the resources available to accomplish their goals.
  2. You Don’t Have the Right Person for the Job: Companies must have the right people in place for an incentive-based system to function successfully. If you hired someone who isn’t a good fit for the job, you’ll come to realize that when it’s time to set up and track goals.

Retaining employees if often easier said than done, so it’s important to make it an ongoing effort. Supervisors who fail to provide clear expectations, feedback, and earning potential typically have higher turnover rates. A critical element for retention is a strategy for investing in your employees by rewarding them when they achieve their goals. It shows that they are appreciated for the impact they are making that is helping the company grow.

 

Read more: http://www.construction-today.com/editor-s-blog/3303-tips-for-creating-performance-incentives