Gone are the days where you join a company straight out of school and work there until you retire. Today, people are not afraid to tell their employers what they want or to shop around for a better offer somewhere else. Employee retention is one of the toughest challenges businesses of all sizes and shapes are facing—even in a global economic downturn.
So, what does this mean to business owners?
Is it possible to keep hold of great employees, or do you just accept that low employee retention rates are the normal state of things?
The truth is, you will never stem the flow completely.
However, with the right work environment and strategies in place, you can make your business as attractive as possible to good employees and make them want to stay longer.
6 Strategies To Retain Employees
Ready to find out how to keep your employees from jumping ship? Let’s dive in.
A good team at work is critical to keeping people hired for longer. You don’t necessarily need everyone to get along all the time. But you need everyone to show motivation and feel that everyone else is pulling their weight. Employees start to feel disillusioned if they believe they are doing more work than others on the team.
When hiring new team members, think about their work ethic and personality. You want to try to ensure they will fit in with the rest of the company, and the general company culture. You can do this by getting more established team members to come and sit in on the interviews once candidates get to the final stage of hiring.
Stats show that people want to be heard and want to know that their needs are being taken into account. In order to do this, you need to have regular conversations with your team in group settings as well as in one-on-one settings.
This should take place in both the conventional work environment and in more casual settings, like having lunch or a cup of coffee outside of the office. This will make your employees feel like you are recognizing what they bring to the company.
When meeting with employees, remember to ask about how they are doing, both personally and professionally. They may have some great ideas about how other employees could improve the business or their own workflow. They may also be going through something tough or struggling with work-life balance, which could impact their performance and need some attention from you.
Another critical part of building a strong, positive relationship with good employees is to make sure that everyone knows where they stand.
A business relationship is all about meeting expectations. This means that both you and your employees need to understand exactly what they’re expected to achieve.
It’s also important to have this conversation up front in the hiring process, and then continue having it as new work or projects come up.
If you want to promote employee engagement and make them feel empowered and confident in their work, you need to be available for questions. They should never reach the end of a project or piece of work only to hear that it isn’t what they should’ve been doing, or that it wasn’t done correctly.
The more important an employee is to your business, the more you should be giving them in terms of incentives to stay with the company. This includes perks, such as flexitime or financial rewards in the form of a bonus.
When people get rewarded for hard work, loyalty or talent, they feel more inclined to stay where they’re recognized. Additionally, if other team members see their colleagues getting recognized and rewarded, it could very well motivate them to work harder to get the same bonuses and perks.
Recognition and reward don’t always have to cost business owners days off or bonuses. You can also acknowledge a job well done simply through a company-wide email to tell everyone that a project is completed and these are the staff members who made it happen. However, the more tangible the acknowledgment, the better employees will feel, especially in the long term.
People are often looking for opportunities to grow.
If they feel like they have stagnated in a company or have gone as far as they can in their careers in one place, they will start to look elsewhere for work.
As a business, you can find ways to offer professional development. This can be through paying for courses or training a number of employees to use software that streamlines operations. You can even give people room to switch gears within your company if it’s large enough.
Programs like this are great because they build up the skillsets within your business, as well as show your employees that you care about their personal development. Your faith in them is likely to be rewarded with their loyalty and continued motivation to excel at work.
If you aren’t sure where to start with an employee development program, ask your staff members what they want. In your meetings and catch-ups, talk to them about where they see themselves in the future and what jobs they want to be doing. This should give you plenty of information about how to structure a development program or what kind of courses you could invest in.
The position of business owner or boss is something that so many strive for or yearn for. However, they don’t realize that you need to actually be a leader if you want your employees to be happy and stay with the company long term.
An effective leader inspires people to follow them and inspires loyalty in any number of employees. A regular boss is easy to leave when another job opportunity comes up.
Creating a happy, healthy, and productive workplace is the key to employee retention. Focusing on maximizing employee experience and satisfaction goes a long way towards training workers who are an integral part of your business. Start implementing these employee retention strategies now and you should see the difference.
Author Bio: This article is written by our marketing team at HR Cloud. HR Cloud is a leading provider of HR solutions, including recruiting, onboarding, employee engagement, and intranet software. Our aim is to help your company improve employee engagement, employee productivity, and to save you valuable time!