Employee retention plays an important part in the development and success of any business. With fewer turnovers and top talent remaining in their jobs for a longer period of time, causes fewer stops and starts within the organization.
However, achieving successful employee retention is often challenging, especially when there are many variables that influence this retention rate. You need to keep your employees happy in their roles, while also providing enough satisfaction that they don’t look elsewhere.
According to one study by Gartner, 91% of HR leaders are concerned about employee turnover in the immediate future. To avoid becoming a part of these statistics, it’s important to be proactive in ensuring your employees are going to stick around.
In this guide, you’ll learn about the benefits of employee retention and six practices that will help to improve your own company’s employee retention rate.
Ultimately, you’ll have all of the tips and tools you’ll need to keep your employees on the side and working for the business for longer as a result.
The Importance of Employee Retention
Why is employee retention so important for your business? From an outsider’s perspective, if your company is seeing people come and go in such a short space of time, this may open you up to scrutiny from other businesses.
For those who are looking to apply to your company, they may no longer find you appealing and that means a loss of potential top talent.
It Reduces Employee Turnover Costs
Being able to make cost reductions in business is always useful, especially as we’re navigating a pretty economically sensitive climate currently. With fewer employees leaving, you’re not having to spend money on recruiting new employees in their place.
The cost of recruiting someone isn’t cheap, with the average company spending about $4,700 per hire. Not only does it impact your finances but the process of hiring someone is extensive and takes up the time of those other employees responsible for finding the new hire.
Helps Improve Engagement
Focusing on employee retention will certainly help with improving engagement rates. With better job satisfaction, you’ll likely see more of your employees being productive within your business and more importantly, showing engagement in everything they do for the company.
Improving engagement rates is important as it helps speed up the progress that the business makes when looking to achieve new milestones.
Aids Customer Service
The behavior and attitudes of your employees are likely going to bleed into the customer services you provide to your clients.
When your employees are happy, they’re going to direct that positive attitude toward your customers, which is always useful.
5 Ways to Improve Successful Employee Retention
What are the secrets to successful employee retention? You’re not going to fix employee retention overnight.
Employees need to see real change and change happening over time but at the same time, it needs to be prioritized immediately to help curb any more employees from walking out the door.
Introduce a Reward Platform to Incentivize Staff
While you’re not obliged to do anything more than pay your staff the wages they’ve earned, it’s always useful to offer more where possible.
One way to do this is by looking into reward platforms to incentivize your employees. A reward platform is a great way of compensating employees for their recent hard work. These platforms are a central hub that all staff are able to access and make use of.
These platforms not only offer recognition for the hard work your staff are doing but reward them for it too. Whether it’s a monetary gain or not, getting that recognition is sure to put a pep in the step of that employee who may have been looking to leave the organization.
Encourage Communication With Regular Meetings
Did you know that effective team communication increases the rate of employee retention by 4.5 times more than businesses that lack effective communication in the workplace?
If you’re not communicating with your employees, then how do you know if they’re truly happy within their role and the company? This lack of communication is fixed simply with more opportunities for discussion.
For example, setting up a 1-2-1 meeting once a week or once a month is extremely helpful.
It may also be worth introducing a communications platform that helps keep everyone on the same page, regardless of the working environment they’re in. Platforms like Slack are great tools for employee communication from remote teams to hybrid working situations.
Provide a Strategy for Employee Growth Within the Organization
While not all staff members have aspirations of climbing the ranks within their careers, some do. Some will look toward the business they’re in for those opportunities if they’re available. As a company, it’s often worth promoting staff internally.
That means you need to strategize employee growth within your organization. Speak to management and those making the decisions when it comes to promotions.
Make sure management is considering those already within the organization and if the skills or talent are readily available with existing staff.
By prioritizing your current employees for career growth, you’re going to further cement that employee satisfaction and happiness you’re after.
Often enough, it’s those who don’t feel appreciated or recognized for their talents, that end up leaving first. Unfortunately, those staff also end up being some of your best.
Create a Healthy but Competitive Company Culture to Keep Them Engaged
In order to encourage employees to stick around for longer, it’s beneficial to take a look at your company culture and the dynamic you’ve created as an organization.
While a competitive environment is healthy in some ways, you don’t want it to be bordering on toxic where employees are trying to deceive each other to get ahead.
With that being said, look at how you could improve the company culture if it’s not looking great currently. This could be done by addressing any outstanding work relationship problems or being transparent with staff when it’s needed. When employees are tested but in a healthy manner, they’re more likely to remain with the business for longer.
Empower Employees to Suggest Changes
Feedback is important for business, whether that’s from your customers or via your employees. Just like customer feedback, it’s useful to provide opportunities for employees to feedback on their concerns or wants within the business.
Whether this is done anonymously through online feedback forms or within company meetings, you want to create a safe space where feedback is appreciated. Often employees will refrain from giving feedback for fear of offending or getting themselves into trouble.
However, without that feedback, your organization isn’t given the opportunity to grow. It also causes underlying problems to bubble away, resulting for example, with staff leaving for new ventures.
Provide Training Opportunities for Staff
Another way of helping with career development and improving employee retention rates is by providing training opportunities. Training allows for employees to learn more about their role whether it’s industry developments or hard skills that will benefit their job productivity.
It’s important that all businesses are offering training opportunities to their staff, yet that doesn’t always happen. By showing a willingness to invest in your employees through training and courses, the more it shows loyalty to them.
Start exploring what your employees might be lacking in their skillset or experience and invest in more training for staff across all of your workforce.
Common Reasons for Poor Employee Retention
If you’re worried that your employee retention is wavering, then there are a few common reasons that contribute to poor employee retention and high turnover rates. These include:
- A lack of growth or progression within the business
- Poor compensation for work efforts
- No innovation or opportunity for change in the organization
- Absence of positive company culture
- No organizational structure or hierarchy
By not addressing poor employee retention, you’re going to lose people that are of real value to the organization. They may end up going to your competitors, which is only going to put you at a further disadvantage.
Consider if your business is experiencing any of these problems and figure out a way to fix them fast. They may be small changes or big changes but by being proactive with employee retention practices, the more you’ll keep staff in their roles.
Turn Around your Employee Retention Rates This Year
As a business, it’s common to experience some degree of employee turnover. The aim is to reduce this as much as possible. Assess your current employee turnover rate and make comparisons to previous years. If this is slowly on the rise, then that means something needs to be changed.
Your employees are an essential part of the business, so don’t lose them when the changes could be simple!
Natalie Redman is a freelance writer with two years of experience in web page copywriting for businesses across many industries. She’s also the owner of two blog websites and a Youtube content creator.
