By Charlie Fletcher, Freelance Writer
Employee talent isn’t infinite, and even if it were, there are good reasons for you to strive to retain the workforce you currently have rather than work constantly to fill vacancies within your team. In marketing, in particular, high turnover rates can significantly impact client experience — a negative impact that makes it much more difficult to maintain relationships with lucrative and long-term clients.
Believe it or not, the most efficient solution to both problems of high staff turnover and poor client relationships is: investing in employee development.
How Does Turnover Affect CX, Exactly?
Marketing is all about creating relationships — between businesses and their customers, of course, but also between your clients and your firm. To market a business successfully, marketers need to understand critical details about that business, and those details aren’t always easy to put into an account manager’s file.
With consistent communication, your marketing teams can get to know a client as intimately as your clients know themselves, which can lead to incredibly impactful campaigns. For example, an engaged and educated staff will understand how a client prefers to handle every aspect of their social media presence, from product launches to holiday greetings to customer complaints.
Further, the happiness and satisfaction of your employees can directly impact how they interact with clients — especially during more fraught interactions. For instance, when negativity appears on social media, you need your staff to know exactly how to react to preserve positive reputations for clients’ brands. That includes responding quickly to any complaints that come in and being as understanding to customers and clients as they possibly can. And ultimately, an experienced workforce will be more adept at this than new trainees.
However, if your teams are constantly reshuffling with new recruits, they’ll most likely miss the opportunity to deliver the quality marketing experience your clients crave. To ensure consistency, for your workforce and your clients, you need to keep turnover rates low, and employee development is a critical component of keeping workers around.
How Does Employee Development Lower Turnover Rates?
Many marketing leaders are so focused on delivering value to their clients that they forget the importance of delivering value to their employees. Every marketing agency needs talent to survive and thrive, which means that some of the best employees have their pick of workplaces. If yours doesn’t meet their needs in terms of career development and fulfillment, they will happily move along, worsening your client experience in the process. Fortunately, employee development isn’t difficult or expensive to provide, so you can begin turning around your turnover rates fast.
What Employee Development Programs Work Best?
The best employee development programs for your marketing agency will depend on the needs and wants of your workforce. You should spend some time communicating with your staff, and ensuring those communications are as effective as possible. That requires essentials, like being polite and personal, as well as concise and clear and encouraging feedback.
This can help you get to know individual and collective interests and goals, before committing to specific employee development programs. You might work with your staff to create vision boards, which depict the kind of workplace culture and benefits that will keep them engaged; in any case, your communications should be focused on developing a personal rapport that can lead to mutual insights and respect.
You may end up providing development programs such as these:
Mentoring and Reverse Mentoring
Mentor-mentee relationships provide unrivaled connection and support within a workforce, and all the most lauded employee development programs contain some element of mentorship. It is important to remember that the relationship goes both ways: New recruits gain wisdom from established workers, and leaders gain insight into the perspective of frontline staff.
Career and Education Planning.
If you want to keep your prized talent on staff, you need to know their career goals. Career and education planning creates a realistic roadmap for workers while helping leaders plan for meaningful in-house promotions in the years to come.
Reskilling and Upskilling
You want the talent with the highest-quality training — so why not create that talent for yourself? Employees should have access to extensive training opportunities, well beyond their onboarding. Cross-training can help workers collaborate more effectively, and management training will prepare them for leadership within your firm, incentivizing them to stick around.
Focus on cultivating essential skills for marketing professionals and consultants at any kind of agency. This could include soft skills related to communication, creativity, and organization, as well as hard skills related to research, writing, and analytics. Developing these kinds of skills may not only encourage employees to stay but also to help with growing your agency, such as developing new lines of business, seeking consulting opportunities, or obtaining new clients.
Tuition Assistance
There are some credentials that you can’t provide through in-house training. If you want your marketing staff to have advanced degrees or other costly certifications, you can support them through their education with tuition assistance. In addition to improving employee retention, education benefits like these can lead to a learning-centric workplace culture, which offers all sorts of advantages for your firm and your clients.
DEI Initiatives
Underrepresented employees — women, BIPOC, and people with disabilities — need extra assistance in the workplace to ensure professional equity. Within the broader employee development umbrella, initiatives in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) can help reduce bias within your marketing firm, introduce different and valuable perspectives to benefit clients, and ensure the elevation of underrepresented workers across the marketing industry.
It’s important to recognize the real harm high employee turnover is having on your client relationships. The sooner you invest in programs employees want and need, the sooner you can retain the talent your clients deserve.
