Brexit and your employees

This covers some of the challenges Brexit may create for businesses and their employees and how to overcome them.

With the restriction of ‘free movement of labour’ within the UK, the labour market is going to reduce with the main source being the native workforce. This could present many challenges to your business as the UK labour demographic is that of an ageing workforce with many employees looking at retirement in the next decade.

This will make recruitment and retention of your workforce more challenging so the question is, what should you be doing now to impact this in the future?

Know your Employees

A happy employee will work harder. A healthy employee will have less time of sick. Planning for the challenges that Brexit may present to your company alone is not enough, you need to make sure your workforce is on board too.

Within manufacturing, one of the biggest challenges everyone faces is how to engage your employees and how to motivate them. A further challenge is every work force is different so there is no ‘one solution fits all’.

A result of this is that there are many ways in which you can motivate your employees by looking into and developing your wellbeing culture. According to The Mental Health Foundation by addressing wellbeing at work increases productivity by as much as 12% (Mental Health Foundation).  Further investigations into manufacturing as an industry saw that less than 15% of manufacturers assessed the risk to mental health of their employees in 2018 (Institute of Employment Studies).

Why is this important? It goes back to knowing your employees. A happy employee will work harder. If they turn up to work and are stressed about money management, an argument with their partner, ill heath or any other stressors they might have then this will be the priority on their mind. Potentially reducing output or the quality of their work.

Another challenge that needs to be considered is the aging workforce, with over a quarter of skilled workers looking at retiring in the next decade (CV Library). By knowing your employee base, you can build succession plans and help your employees to work towards retirement. You need to see if these people coming up to retirement have passed on the skills and if not action a plan whilst you still have them.

Review your benefits

Make your employees your biggest priority and take care of their wellbeing. Studies have shown this will have a big impact on your productivity and reduce absenteeism, helping to reduce the costs of recruitment (staff turnover).  Look at the Corinthian YouTube channel for our series on 9 steps to a wellbeing strategy.
 

About the Author

George Bentham
George is an Employee Benefits Consultant at Corinthian Benefits, an independent corporate financial advice firm. Corinthian help companies attract talent and retain their employees by creating comprehensive, personalised solutions. Corinthian provide on-going support for all pension, protection and perk needs.