Attracting top talent is very challenging in Bend and Central Oregon as a whole. The lack of affordable and available housing, child-care capacity issues and paying a competitive wage are all acting against you. But, let’s say you do secure that top talent. Now what? How do you keep them?
Simple. Invest in them. Especially the early to mid-level employees. Year over year, studies show that investing in the growth of employees leads to greater engagement, productivity and the ability to retain talent. This is particularly true for millennials. In fact:
- According to the LinkedIn 2018 Workplace Learning Report, 94 percent of employees say that they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career and development.
- By 2025, millennials will make up 75 percent of the U.S. workforce, and 87 percent of millennials rate development as important to them in a job.
- Gallup finds that organizations that have made a strategic investment in employee development report 11 percent greater profitability and are twice as likely to retain their employees.
Additionally, according to Forbes, the top five reasons to invest in your employees’ development are to:
- Attract and retain great employees
- Boost employer reputation
- Increase innovation and performance
- Allow for upward mobility for promotable employees
- Encourage a look-forward mindset (visionaries)
Says William Craig, contributor for Forbes, “When you strategically invest in employees, you attract and keep all the best candidates, and you also build a strong work culture unafraid of innovation, change, failure and success. Employees take the bull by its horns and run with ideas, instead of running away from problems.”
“Awesome! I need to invest in my employees’ development. But how?” That’s simple, too. Attend the third annual Young Professionals (YP) Summit. If your company has employees under the age of 40, the YP Summit is a powerful investment in the development, engagement and retention of your staff.
With all the disruption from the pandemic, this year’s YP Summit won’t be business as usual. The Bend YP team created a new hybrid event style that allows attendees to gather in small group pods across Central Oregon to engage together with live-streamed speakers and workshops.
These pods are limited in size, with a health-department approved safety plan in place. Attendees can also opt for a full virtual-only event, and still engage with speakers and peers in real time through the event app, Whova.
This year’s YP Summit focuses on themes of resilience, connection and communication.
Participants will:
- Lean in and look at failure and risk through new lenses of learning, growth and opportunity in a segment featuring our keynote speaker, Kristen Hadeed, renowned entrepreneur and author of Permission to Screw Up.
- Examine how teams thrive and succeed when shared values and trust are established early in a session with David Salciccioli, executive coach and educator with Coachwell.
- Dig into aspects of interpersonal conflict and learn the skills to bring diverse perspectives together for even more powerful outcomes as they engage with Moe Carrick, coach, consultant and author of Bravespace Workplace and Fit Matters.
This summit will take place from 12:30-5pm on Friday, August 28, and at just $50 per person, it’s well worth the investment of time and money to retain your top talent.
For more information and to get your folks registered, click here. By the way, the first 30 individuals to register receive a 30 percent discount. The decision is even simpler now… isn’t it?
