The global offshore outsourcing market has evolved significantly in the past few years. Competitive salaries and benefits still attract talent, but these are insufficient to ensure staff retention in a competitive hiring market.
Today, employees put more value on mental health, career development, diversity, wellness, and learning & development. To ensure retention, organisations are advised to understand and meet these needs. Here are some strategies we recommend to help you retain your offshore employees.
Update Your Work Models
The pandemic has transformed how organisations manage their workforce. Many offshore employees no longer want to return to their old working ways. Here are several things you can do to keep your work models better:
- Develop a work policy with your offshore team regarding remote and hybrid work arrangements. Include communication standards, KPIs, meeting attendance, and schedule availability guides. Implement communication windows for different time zones.
- Align your work policies to onshore and offshore team members to ensure everyone understands them.
- Set regular reviews of your work arrangements every six months. Make sure you consider all of the employees’ feedback and take necessary actions to improve them and make them happy and satisfied.
Establish a Development Plan for Your People
An employee development plan also called an employee growth plan, is a program that can help your offshore team members improve their current skillset or expertise and advance to the new roles of the organisation.
A well-executed development plan will allow your employees to be more confident on their career ladder and improve their performance and retention.
Several effective employee growth plan programs include training, task/job rotations, coaching, mentoring, simulation, conferences, self-study, and workshops/committees/working groups.
Implement Performance Review and Feedback Mechanism
A performance review system is vital to bring out the best in your employees. It gauges whether they achieve the expected level of performance, addresses and identifies poor performance, and supports the alignment of their goals.
You can implement a goal-setting methodology using SMART goals, OKRs, and KPIs to do this. You can also bring constructive and unbiased feedback by trying 360-degree feedback from your peers, cross-functional colleagues, and direct managers.
In addition, performance reviews also allow you to know their needs and concerns. Along with the performance review, you can also do surveys. Below are several survey recommendations:
- Keep surveys frequent and fun. Use open-ended questions and polls. You can also think of games to keep your feedback generation process enjoyable and engaging.
- Keep your surveys short and simple. It has higher completion rates, and you can collect high-quality data.
- Measure all improvements needed to review the impacts on productivity, business, and employees.
Ensure a Healthy Work-life Balance
Burnout is a serious problem for your offshore team. Show your offshore employees that you value their wellness holistically. Establish a balance between work and social life by conducting well-being initiatives. A few things we recommend:
- Provide opportunities to step back from work to address stress and health-related problems.
- Train your management team on how to recognise early signs of employee burnout. Empower them to be more involved in addressing issues earlier.
- Secure an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) that is accessible for both offshore and onshore teams.
Encourage Collaboration
Collaboration is critical to a happier, more transparent, and more productive workplace. We suggest maximising tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams and boosting team-building activities to achieve genuine collaboration.
Finding and hiring the best offshore talents can be difficult, but retaining them is a significant challenge.
Find an experienced offshoring partner to guide you
Satellite Office has a proven track record of assisting businesses to leverage the benefits of outsourcing by building a dedicated, highly skilled, and cost-efficient offshore team in the Philippines.
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