Amid a cooling labor market, it can be hard to tell if retention strategies are actually working. But Yelp may have found the key to keeping its employees around.
Yelp’s average employee tenure increased from 2.8 years in 2022 to four years in May—that’s notable, considering the average tenure in the information industry is 4.2 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“It certainly has been a pretty significant increase…in a pretty short period of time,” Carmen Amara, Yelp’s chief people officer, told HR Brew.
She attributes the boost to three internal programs, including revamped approaches to employee feedback, career development, and embracing flexible work.
Employee feedback. Since the start of the pandemic, but particularly in the last two years, Amara’s team has been reworking Yelp’s employee feedback mechanisms.
The company solicits feedback from employees via an annual engagement survey (at the corporate level), focus groups, meetings, and other sources like Slack channels.
This feedback has influenced much of Yelp’s HR strategy, including its flexible work model, leadership development programs, and benefits offerings—such as its wellness reimbursement benefit, which can be used for gym memberships, massages, running gear, or other health and wellness purposes.
Employees interviewed by HR Brew spoke positively of the company’s receptiveness to feedback regarding benefits.
“Within the last year or two, because they were listening, a lot of us more middle-aged employees were like, ‘Hey, we would love some support with perimenopause and menopause,’ and they added on that benefit,” said Jennifer Jones, an associate regional manager for Yelp’s community team, who has been at the company for nine years.
Flexible work. Yelp, like many companies, pivoted to remote work at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. But bucking the return-to-office trend, the San Francisco-based company announced in June 2022 that it would remain distributed after an internal survey found that 86% of employees preferred working remotely most or all of the time.
Yelp’s longstanding embrace of flexibility certainly helped: Kadecia Ber, a senior director of sales planning and account strategy who’s worked at Yelp for more than 16 years, went remote nine years ago after deciding to move herself and her kids closer to family in the Midwest.
“Because there’s enough trust in the work that I did and how I accomplished what I was able to accomplish, I was completely supported to go remote,” Ber said.
And it’s been a boon for recruitment, Amara said, particularly as other tech companies have rolled back their remote and hybrid arrangements. In 2023, Yelp saw a 183% year over year increase in visits to its career pages, and a 103% increase in applications for sales roles, and 52% increase in applications for general and administrative roles compared to 2021.
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Career development. In 2022, after hearing that employees wanted more opportunities to learn from senior leaders, Yelp created a leadership development curriculum, open to all staff, featuring conversations with executives, education on effective communication, and peer-to-peer learning sessions.
While it was well received, Amara’s team noticed a drop off in participation as employees progressed, so they introduced another program, in which managers serve as coaches and support in-the-moment development opportunities through regular occurrences like one-on-one meetings.
Jones said she has benefited from coaching support from her previous manager. Prior to being promoted into her current role in August 2023, she expressed interest in becoming a manager to her then-supervisor. Challenged to strengthen her leadership skills, she revived and led Yelp’s Yelders ERG for employees aged 40 and older.
“That helped me as I was building that internal résumé. When I could interview for this [open role], it was another example of something I’d done outside of my day to day role to help the company,” she said.
Today, she manages a team of community ambassadors based in several West Coast cities.
But what about the “Big Stay”? Yelp’s tenure increase coincides with the trend of US workers staying put in their current jobs due to fewer opportunities and economic uncertainty. Joel Kennedy, a senior product designer who’s worked at Yelp for more than three years, noted that these macroeconomic factors could be influencing Yelp’s tenure rate, particularly among tech workers, who have been laid off by the hundreds of thousands since 2022.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty for sure,” he said, before noting he isn’t anxious about layoffs at Yelp. “People are less bullish in looking for other opportunities, there’s also just a flood of solid candidates on the market, competition when it comes to these tech jobs.”
Amara acknowledged that while increased tenure can have positive effects, like increased productivity, it can also pose its own challenges.
“We want to make sure that we’re continuing to keep our employees engaged,” she said. “So it’s an opportunity for us to continue to evolve our development and engagement strategies.”