The UK has recently seen the emergence of what HR Solutions has dubbed a ‘candidates’ market’, with the COVID-19 pandemic and recent changes in immigration rules having made it more difficult for UK businesses to recruit overseas talent.

So, even if your UK business is currently growing, you need to be careful to look after your existing employees, lest this growth potentially come under threat. Here are just a few steps you could take…

Make sure money doesn’t have to be an issue for your employees

That way, other employers can’t easily tempt them away just by waving a larger pay packet in front of their face. After all, even just financially, there’s a lot more to a job position than just the salary.

So, if you can’t quite afford to hike that salary, you could resort to alternative means of keeping your workers financially comfortable – like updating the overall compensation package available to them and offering one-time bonuses for hitting particular targets.

Provide growth opportunities

According to survey data from Harvard Business Review, 68% of workers worldwide would be interested in retraining and learning new skills. If many of your own workers think likewise, you don’t want them to have to leave your company just to pursue this course of action.

One good idea would be to regularly hold retention interviews with your employees, where you ask them what would make them opt to stay. If any of them are considering a major change in career direction, you could consider how they might be able to make that change where they already are.

Help your employees to look after their families

For example, if some of your employees have small children, you could give these workers more paid time off or let them work flexible hours. That way, these employees will be able to adjust their work schedules so that they can be with their little ones at especially convenient times.

Through taking out a company life insurance policy, you could even make sure that an employee’s family will receive extra financial support if the employee in question dies.

Prioritise keeping workers connected with each other

You might not have realised the degree to which social connection fuels productivity. However, the pandemic has likely left many of us more socially adrift than ever before.

Hence, you should ideally investigate creative ways for your employees to build fruitful relationships with each other – and, indeed, with you. If any of your workers are still home-based, you could ask them if they are interested in coming back to the traditional office.

However, leave flexible working an option for your employee base

Yes, the pandemic is much less of a worry than it once was – but many of your employees might have grown so accustomed to home-based working over the last two years that they aren’t too keen on relinquishing it now.

Recently, jobs offering hybrid working and flexible hours have increased in number, Sky News reports. So, should you really stick to a pre-pandemic model of working?