A successful business is a stable one. When we speak about stability, one key factor contributing to a healthily growing company is its employee retention rate. Simply put, employee retention is an organization’s capacity to hold onto its workforce and stop employees from turning over. However, the attrition rate in most companies has increased manifold, leaving business owners scrambling for effective employee retention strategies as a priority.
High employee attrition and turnover rate can strain a business incredibly, and a solid employee retention program is what’s needed right now to win this battle.
To sum up the importance of staff retention more succinctly, below is a list of why you should focus on keeping your workers working with you.
Why is Employee Retention Important?
Despite your best efforts, employees do end up leaving. However, the attrition rate must be balanced and preferably minimal to reduce the costs of begetting new hires at every turn. A higher retention rate impacts your business in a number of ways, such as –
1. Reduced Company Costs
Replacing a leaving employee costs considerable money, and even more – when you consider the effects on your company’s overall morale and performance. Additionally, the process of initiating recruitment and onboarding from scratch is time-consuming.
Having a robust retention program for employees will cut down all the costs associated with resource loss and get you better ROIs.
2. Greater Productivity
When employees leave a workplace frequently, building a team where all members are equally knowledgeable, skilled, and experienced is difficult. Training new hires and nudging them towards the required potential can take months and strain other employees as they try to pick up the slack.
3. A Flourishing Work Culture
Organizations with high retention rates typically have a healthy work environment where employees feel included, engaged, and satisfied. As a self-fulfilling cycle, happy employees, in turn, are likely to be more involved with the company and not look elsewhere for fulfillment.
4. Happier Customers
Employees who have been in the company for a long time have the experience required to deal with customers efficiently and keep them satisfied. Plus, a happy employee will exude the same positivity while dealing with clients, leading to better brand perception.
5. Enhanced Employee Morale
When an employee leaves, it can demotivate the remaining employees. Workplace morale improves with a high retention rate, resulting in a more positive, upbeat environment where engagement and drive to perform efficiently are high.
Top 15 Actionable Ideas Employee Retention Strategies
To keep your best-performing members working for you, consider implementing these 20 carefully curated employee retention ideas in your workplace.
1. Offer Positive Feedback Often
The importance of feedback in a company is well established, and that includes both positive and constructive feedback. However, constructive feedback is useful as a corrective measure. But positive feedback makes employees aware that their good deeds are noticed and appreciated by their supervisors.
Tip the balance more in favor of praise than criticism. This will ensure your employees have the motivation to better themselves every day.
Your Initiative: Hold biweekly team meetings to offer positive feedback to each of your employees individually.
2. Foster Creativity
Many companies promise to nurture creativity but seldom provide any chance for it to manifest itself. Encourage employees to explore their innovative side by investing in ideas or policies conducive to it.
You can incentivize new ideas, set up brainstorming sessions, open side projects that the workers can contribute to, and even hold spontaneous, fun sessions as a break from the monotony of work.
Your Initiative: Generate incentivized opportunities, such as asking your employees to come up with ideas for your organization’s social media handle to inculcate innovative thinking. Remember to keep the topic relevant to your business but still different enough that it doesn’t feel like another task.
3. Encourage Mutual Respect
A workplace where employees do not feel respected can make them feel devalued or unimportant to the organization as a whole. This, in turn, leads to disengagement, low morale, and a possibility of them exiting the company altogether to look for better opportunities.
You can create a culture of respect in the office space by offering timely feedback and acknowledgment. Try appreciating your workers’ input and handling employee affairs with empathy and thoughtfulness. Another step can be making it a point to ask about your colleagues’ well-being often.
Your Initiative: This month, you can try greeting all your colleagues when they arrive and leave, say thank you for the assignments completed before the deadline, and offer them help as and when required.
4. Provide Ample Opportunities for Growth
Growth is among the top personal goals employees set for themselves; without a visible opportunity for advancement, it’s easy for stagnation to creep in. Without something to look forward to, employees are likelier to get disillusioned about their role and look for opportunities elsewhere.
By introducing a training program that produces tangible results, you can help diminish the general feeling of being “stuck” and help your employees clear their stance on what comes next. Other plans of action include leveraging resources like online courses, books, videos, and workshops with weighted assessments to entice people to stay.
Your Initiative: Provide coursebook materials tailored to each of your employees’ requirements and offer rewards if the assessments are completed successfully.
5. Promote Trust & Transparency
Employees are generally inclined to perform better if they:
— believe in the individuals assigning them tasks
— have complete transparency at all stages of communication regarding the assignment
To forge trust and transparency in a workplace, take extra steps to connect with your employees. Remember to motivate them, take accountability, and give credit where it’s due. Avoid playing favorites, and display honesty as an example for others to follow.
Your Initiative: Hold one-one-conversations with your employees to learn how their stay at the company is going. Enquire if they need any help or simply discuss what’s on their minds.
6. Reward Effort Along With Results
Rewarding results is easier – it’s a palpable representation of how hard or how well someone has worked. Or so it seems. A peek at the ground realities suggests that a lack of visible positive outcomes does not always amount to poor performance or inefficiency.
Rather, it may be due to some factors, such as
- The process not going as planned,
- Battling unforeseen frictions,
- The nature of the work, etc.
When an employee goes unnoticed despite putting in all the work, it can make them feel inadequate and deter them from striving for further betterment, or even worse, leave. This can be avoided if efforts are acknowledged and rewarded along with results.
Your Initiative: This week, recognize the contributions of each employee in a project. Point out how all your employees’ work impacted the company positively, not just the top-performing ones.
7. Offer a Competitive Salary
Financial stability is a significant motivator for workers when deciding on a job, as are monetary benefits that actually matter (think insurance, healthcare plans, and the like).
Additionally, if you are paying below the industry standards, you are opening up the scope for your employees to seek out organizations that would remunerate their work fairly.
Your Initiative: Offer your employees a pay raise, regular incentives, ESOPs, or other similar monetary rewards every month.
8. Identify & Alleviate Employee Pain Points
If your employee’s work-life balance is haywire, you should address this issue on priority.. Anybody working all the time is bound to burn out and disengage from their tasks. This doesn’t bode well for your organization, at least not if you are looking forward to having your employees be with you in the long haul.
To avoid this, you may offer to hold open discussions with your employees. This will let you learn if any frustrations are building up and their possible solutions.
Your Initiative: Offer a paid vacation. As a long-term remedial, hold weekly meetings to understand if everyone is shouldering their responsibilities evenly.
9. Create a Culture of Two-Way Feedback
It’s important to offer feedback to your employees, but it’s equally important to receive it back. A culture of open, two-way feedback removes the scope of any oversight on your part and helps employees feel heard.
Many employees tend to believe that nothing will actually change, even if a worthy idea is pitched. Create opportunities where your team members can voice their thoughts comfortably and have their ideas taken into consideration. This will also help your employees feel they can make a difference in the workplace and, therefore, engage more.
Your Initiative: Ask your employees for their opinion on a crucial project, an executive decision, a new business development, or any venture that may require the company to transform. Alternatively, pass anonymous survey forms to everyone to know about any hidden grievances, complaints, or issues.
Try it here: Employee Satisfaction Survey
10. Make Your Employees Feel Included
No employee wants to feel like an outsider to the organization they are associated with. It’s important to nurture an environment that includes them as key components in the business progress without any discrimination or bias creeping in.
The culture of inclusion must percolate at all levels – from hiring to professional advancement to performance management. You will need to proactively address all instances of non-inclusion to make everybody feel welcome and safe in the workplace.
Your Initiative: Hold one-on-one, open-ended conversations with each employee to gauge their satisfaction level with the company. Discuss their roles and formulate strategies for overall improvement.
11. Reduce Boredom
Working on the same thing daily can invite stagnation and apathy. Conversely, too many difficult projects or hurdles back to back have the potential to make your workers exhausted. Space out challenges in a healthy way that neither tires nor bores your employees.
For every new challenge you formulate, it is necessary to keep in mind that what one finds easy may seem difficult to another. Hence, you must express your faith in your team members’ potential, make them see failure as an opportunity to grow, and foster a growth mindset while pushing them out of their comfort zones.
Your Initiative:
- Find out the areas of interest for each of your employees.
- Figure out who is looking for extra opportunities.
- Assign them an extra task each week.
12. Encourage Team-Building Activities
A part of keeping your employees engaged is to make them feel like an integral, invaluable part of something whole – that “something whole” being the team and the organization at large. When all team members are connected, it instills a sense of purpose and makes the workers see their roles in completing the company’s bigger objectives.
Create scopes for activities like volunteering, philanthropic ventures, group outings, and the like to strengthen the bonds between you and your people.
Your Initiative: Organize a pro bono volunteering event outside your workplace as a team-building and career advancement opportunity.
13. Introduce Changes Gradually
As important as change is, a sudden upheaval of a familiar space and routine can overwhelm your employees. Understandably, new measures and policies have to be introduced over time to keep up the company’s progress.
But too many changes within too short a time can make it difficult for the workers to cope and may affect retention rates.
Your Initiative: Instead of making sweeping shifts, try introducing minor upgrades with ample time for your team members to adjust and space out the frequency of the alterations to a wider gap.
14. Set Your Employees Up for Success
Far too often, employees are assigned tasks and left to their own devices without further guidance, assistance, or resources. When your workers aren’t even equipped with what they need to complete a project successfully, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when they end up failing.
Repeated instances of this can lead to your staffers feeling too demotivated to put in any effort at all. It is, therefore, necessary to be in regular contact with your hires and check whether they have all the tools at their disposal to work smoothly.
Your Initiative: This week, assess if all your team members fully understand the project they have undertaken and if they are equipped with all the resources required for its completion. Continue with the guidance frequently until the task ends.
15. Let Your Employees Have Ample Time for Rest
Pushing past the limits, especially when it comes to work, is often glorified. However, employees as human beings do have limitations, and when pushed too hard for too long, chances are they’d collapse under all the stress. It’s also detrimental to the company because fatigued employees are more prone to falling sick, taking leaves, and making (sometimes costly) errors in their work.
To cultivate a healthy work environment with satisfied, dedicated workers, it’s crucial to provide the scope for adequate rest periods to employees regularly.
Your Initiative: Extend your employees’ break sessions by 10 minutes for a month and observe if it has any impact on their performance.
How to Calculate Employee Retention Rate?
To calculate your employee retention rate, you must –
- Choose a set time period
- Determine the number of employees on day 1 of the set time period
- Determine the number of employees from the original set who stayed throughout the term to the last date of the time period
- Divide the number of initial employees by the number of employees who stayed
- Multiply the result by 100
In other words,
Employee retention rate = (Number of employees on the first day of a set period / Number of employees who stayed until the last day of the set period) x 100
Use These Top Employee Retention Strategies to Preserve Your Talent Pool
A high turnover rate is a difficult situation for both the employer and the employee. It destabilizes the working environment of one while potentially stunting career growth for the other. The situation is slightly grimmer for businesses as replacing a worker with new hires not just costs money but slows down the overall development pace as well.
However, all is definitely not lost. There are innumerable ways you can improve the work life of your employees and minimize the reasons for their exit. We hope our list of these top employee retention strategies helps smoothen the road to having your employees with you for a long time!
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