Attracting and Retaining Talent in a Post-Covid World

Source: Crystal Williams, Chief HR Officer, Corpay

With the hiring market in the U.S. returning to a state of normalcy, we are combining proven and new strategies to attract and retain world-class talent as a cornerstone to Corpay’s success in the future. Many companies are taking the same approach. However, it’s still more difficult to hire and keep top talent today than it was prior to Covid, so let’s explore the practices developed during the pandemic that companies including Corpay can use to strengthen their teams moving forward.

To set the stage, consider how we reached this point.

Covid triggered the Great Resignation, where the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported more than 47-million Americans quit their jobs in 2021.

This quickly evolved into the Great Reshuffle, where many simply changed jobs or industries having decided that staying out of the workforce wasn’t an option.

We also saw a Boomerang effect, where many realized the grass wasn’t greener elsewhere and returned to their previous employer, where familiarity and relationships made it easy to pick up where they left off.

Now we have settled into what some have dubbed the Great Stay. The most recent labor statistics show a slowdown in hiring, with the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.2%.

Strategies for retaining talent have gone back to the basics – pay your employees competitively, provide growth opportunities through training, and encourage a healthy work-life balance.

Recognizing good and bad

Recognizing the contributions of younger employees is often well-received. For example, we launched our employee recognition program called Gratitudes about a year ago. It enables managers, peers, and leaders to post a compliment on our intranet about an employee’s work and include optional points that can be renewed for merchandise. Employees also want their voices heard, so, like many organizations, we conduct an annual employee satisfaction survey to provide a clear understanding of what employees like about working at Corpay and what they’d like to see change.

The following are a few things we have done at Corpay in a post-pandemic environment to reinforce what employees already appreciate while also addressing certain shortcomings.

Professional development goes virtual

Offering professional development is essential to retaining talent, even though the nature of that training has changed. Pre-covid, professional development meant assembling in a room with a live instructor over multiple days. Now, learning is more self-directed through virtual tools such as LinkedIn Learning, allowing employees to learn on their timeline and at their pace. Virtual classrooms also have the advantage of being more diverse. When we created our Global Leader Program, it was in-person and attended only by people within each region. Now, we can gather people from every region in one virtual classroom, enabling them to benefit from the various cultures and experiences of the group.

Keeping the entrepreneurial spirit

In addition to raises and promotions, employees are also motivated by their ability to make a real difference in a company’s success. Organizations can feed this entrepreneurial spirit by giving ideas an opportunity to become reality through the support of an “intrapreneur,” a manager who promotes innovation. That person replaces the old suggestion box as a conduit to financial support and staff resources to test innovative new ideas. Some ideas will succeed, and some ideas will not, but part of fostering an entrepreneurial spirit is providing the space to fail fast, either way. We have certainly seen both happen at Corpay over the years.

Back in the office – sort of

As Covid fades from our memories, the pendulum has swung back from a completely remote workplace, to hybrid, to companies demanding mostly or completely in the office. Still, a degree of flexibility is likely a permanent component of corporate life. What’s important is knowing there is no one-size-fits-all when setting a flexibility policy, across companies or even within a single company. Whether it’s remote work or flexible hours, the key is to be deliberate in setting policy that addresses roles, responsibilities, and company culture in a way that provides an amount of flexibility that is fair and reasonable.

Conclusion

During stable times, when you pay employees about what the competition is paying, the differentiators are all the other things – professional development and work-life balance – that will make people come to your company and stay. No one can predict the future, but at Corpay we’re taking full advantage of both traditional and post-Covid strategies to build a productive and happy employee community.