Any agency or company knows hiring top talent and good people is tough right now. The ad industry has its highest employment rate ever in a time when people are fleeing the industry due to burnout.

The last thing an agency leader wants to deal with is seeing their strongest employees go elsewhere. 

So, how do you retain skilled employees during The Great Resignation? The solution is grounded in building a culture of trust. 

How to build a culture of trust

You’ve invested countless hours interviewing, onboarding and training your employees.

On the job, they’ve proven themselves to be strong performers.

You’ve also provided them with the tools and resources to succeed. 

And yet, countless agencies are run by leaders that micromanage their employees.

It’s time to trust them to do their job and get out of their way. 

Here’s how:

• Get everyone on the same page: Be open about what you’re trying to accomplish, your vision and how employees play a part in that vision. The idea here is to get everyone rowing in the same direction.
• Encourage transparency: Building a culture of trust cannot happen without openness. We encourage our employees to be open and transparent about their feelings, and our managers to do the same. Leadership is transparent about company performance and plans for the organization. This transparency infuses a sense of ownership and respect throughout the organization.

Appreciate and recognize your employees

Nothing will burn out a good employee faster than feeling underappreciated.

Appreciation can come in many forms, including a quick thank you, promotion or salary increase.

Recognition can be public or private, and it should come from any level within the organization. 

Here’s how my agency approaches appreciation and recognition:

Peer recognition program

Bonus.ly has been a great addition to our company’s culture.

Each month, employees have a specific number of points that can be used to recognize peers.

Points are accumulated and redeemed through gift cards to restaurants, shops, entertainment, charity donations or cold hard cash.

The Slack integration makes it easy to see who is recognizing who.

Leadership recognition

Peer recognition is wonderful, but employees also need to know that they’re making a real impact on the company. This is where leadership recognition comes in.

Publically, we recognize employees who contribute to the bottom line through company meetings or internal case studies.

This public recognition serves to show appreciation to the employee but also helps to encourage others to achieve similar feats. 

How to build connections between employees

The Institute of Leadership and Management found that 77% of respondents say that building close relationships with colleagues was the most important factor in determining job satisfaction.

Connection is critical in building a culture of trust and ultimately retaining great employees. In a remote workplace, this is especially important.

We’ve found three ways to help build connections between employees:

• Make time for connection: Take the time to connect with employees on a personal level. Building rapport is essential when things are busy. This signals to your employees that even amidst the chaos, they’re still important to you. So, make time during 1:1s to learn about employees and tell them about yourself.
• Enjoy your colleagues: As a primarily remote company, this takes some effort. We regularly use apps like Kahoot for fun quizzes, ice breaker challenges and Polly for polls on Slack.
• Encourage sharing of expertise: Embedded within our culture is both a strong motivation to get better and to support one another. We foster both by sharing our expertise. Employees will create brown bag training sessions taught by various team members. Managers will also often encourage team members to ask questions broadly on Slack. As a result, questions have quick answers and employees are reminded that team support is valued.

Also, make sure to post pictures of team members meeting each other and having a good time. 

Offer flexibility and grace

Always remember that you’ve hired people, not just “workers.”

Work is just one facet of their lives. Burnout in our industry is very real.

Take care to ensure your best employees flourish. To retain great employees, offer flexibility and grace. 

Here’s how we do that: 

• Daily flexibility: Allow some flexibility within the workday for employees to take care of what they need. We regularly have employees that need to pick up their kids, take the dog to the vet or even go for a jog. We’ve found that providing this flexibility enables employees to perform at their best and be more productive. 
• Encourage time off: We saw many of our employees not taking time off during the pandemic. They felt like there was no point because they couldn’t go anywhere. What resulted was decreased productivity and overall gloom within the organization. To turn things around, we encouraged employees to take time off. We implemented an unlimited vacation policy so people didn’t feel like they were “wasting” vacation days. And managers noted when an employee hadn’t taken time off.
• Create backups: One of the concerns in taking time off is the fear that the work will pile up. That’s why we created a system for employees to partner with other employees to act as backups while they’re out. With the backup plans in place, employees are truly “off” when on vacation.
• Allow for grace: Throughout the pandemic, we’ve had to allow some grace for employees dealing with circumstances in their lives that impact work. Everyone goes through stressful events, and its not reasonable to think it won’t affect work. We allow some grace for productivity to decline, work hours to be shortened or additional time off for employees dealing with “life.” 

Build the workplace where you’d like to work

This is how you retain great employees. Trust, appreciation, connection and flexibility are the tenets of a strong culture. But they also happen to be the key to retaining great employees. 

The post How to retain employees during the Great Resignation appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Climbing the corporate ladder isn’t always the most straightforward process, especially for paid search marketers. Professionals seeking to grow their careers need to map out a path, accounting for their unique roles within their organizations.

“The most important thing is to look at your current position,” said Pascal Skropke, CMO of Design-Bestseller, at SMX Next. “Not everybody has the opportunity to work at a fast-growing e-commerce company or startup.”

He added, “Look at where you are and find out if it’s possible to take steps within your company — and understand what your company needs to succeed.”

Skropke says marketers seeking to climb this ladder should establish an “anchor point” within their company — the cross-section of their company’s needs and their career goals. One of these points is the issue of campaign advertising measurement — the lack of direction, accurate data models, and resources for many brands in the digital retail space.

Here are some of the key measurement challenges paid search marketers can help their companies with.

Address issues in advertising spend and ROI

“Performance advertising is killing it for most retailers,” said Andreas Reiffen, founder and CEO of Crealytics, in the same presentation. “At the same time, we see legacy retailers falling behind.”

Despite impressive increases in compound annual growth rate for online retailers such as Etsy, Boohoo, and Farfetch (44%, 55%, and 64%, respectively,), more traditional retailers are falling behind, even in the e-commerce sphere. Reiffen noted that although some of these legacy brands are meeting their KPIs, their slow overall growth could be a major issue down the road.

“The question we need to ask ourselves is, ‘Why am I seeing great results when the company isn’t growing?’” said Reiffen. “The issue we are all facing today is that the measurement is broken. The methodology that we use to track conversions and conversion values — one click, last click, or many clicks — is misleading us because people don’t necessarily buy when they click on ads.”

He added, “They might have happened to click on ads when they purchased, but there’s no direct correlation.”

Inaccurate measurement models can disrupt return on ad spend (ROAS) projections, making it that much harder for legacy brands to stay competitive.

Paid search marketers and managers can help executives of legacy-style brands address these discrepancies by optimizing paid advertising spending — adopting more accurate tracking models and allocating spend more effectively. This can help marketers establish more authority within their brand and encourage executives to lean on them for their expertise in the future.

Establish accurate data analytics systems

“We’re seeing big companies like the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey building departments for data analytics,” said Skropke. “This is a sign that analytics is not just something that the data nerd is working on, but something that’s now on C-level.”

Data matters, not just to search marketers, but to all those in brand leadership positions. The sooner search marketers can encourage their managers and company executives to consult paid media analytics when making business decisions, the more respect they’ll garner from those same decision-makers.

“If you work in a paid search manager role on an operation level, it’s rare that you would be asked to do these things,” said Reiffen. “But it’s a major problem that is present now on the C-level.”

He added, “Measurement is the most important thing to get right, so that’s where we see a good opportunity to step up and challenge the numbers.”

Create a growth strategy and align target market goals

Inaccurate measurement clearly causes issues in advertising ROI and data analytics. Unfortunately, it can also disrupt brand growth by derailing target market strategies.

“Wrong targeting leads to poor results,” said Skropke. “So, we should always ask what’s driving the value for the business. Is this the top-line revenue or is it the profitable acquisition of new customers?”

Whether it’s targeting a disproportionate amount of existing customers or pushing products that have lower than average profit margins, C-level executives will inevitably get parts of the targeting and growth strategy wrong. This is where paid search managers can share their expertise and help leadership set clear, actionable goals.

“So, where’s the opportunity here?” asked Reiffen. “It’s in taking the time to explain this, giving [leadership] examples.”

He added, “Start stepping up and explaining that it’s the targets themselves that are limiting performance.”

The post How paid search marketers can address brand measurement challenges and grow in their careers appeared first on Search Engine Land.