Employee Retention Strategies: The Best Ways to Keep Your Staff Engaged and Happy in Their Role with Your Company
Are you looking for ways to improve employee retention and provide your organization with the consistency it needs to sustain continued growth? That’s wise of you. Employee retention is crucial for your organization, and it’s not just about providing consistency or maintaining a good reputation, either. High turnover costs your company money, time, and resources that you could use in more productive ways.
If you’re interested in learning more about the importance of employee retention, as well as some key employee retention strategies, read on.
Why Is Retaining Top Talent So Important?
As the leader of your organization, you’ve more than likely heard the term “employee retention” more times than you can count, but what you may not know is what exactly makes it such a critical concept in the HR world.
The obvious answer is that no organization wants to seek out, hire, and train new employees constantly. Therefore, retaining the ones they do have is a high priority. While that is undoubtedly true, there’s a fair amount more to it than that. Let’s look at some of the biggest reasons that retaining your top talent is so important.
Inconsistency Is Bad for Business
To make this idea crystal clear, let’s pretend you’re a restaurant owner who is constantly hiring new chefs and teaching them your menu on the fly. As a result of constant turnover, your customers will get a different version of the same dish every time they dine at your establishment. This lack of consistency will likely drive many customers away. You can apply this example across any industry of business.
Top Talent Is Hard to Come By
Employees are more than just numbers. Each one has a different set of skills, talents, and a unique perspective they bring to the table. Losing top talent means you lose all of those things. Some employees may very well be irreplaceable.
Remember that seeking to retain your top talent involves keeping them and their unique abilities with your organization and keeping them away from your competitors.
Workplace Culture Suffers
It takes time for employees to acclimate to company culture and build strong relationships with their co-workers. In a company with high turnover rates, you’re much more likely to find a weak or even non-existent company culture and a workforce that isn’t all that connected.
These conditions do not foster productivity, nor do they promote good employee morale. As a result, more workers will likely leave, worsening your employee retention rate yet more.
It Hurts Your Bottom Line
The point of any business is to make money, and if there’s a fixable issue that’s costing your business money, it should be a priority to set things right. High turnover is a costly issue. From the money spent in the hiring process and the resources used in the training process to customer dissatisfaction with your staff performance, organizations lose a lot more due to high turnover than investing in employee retention.
What Are the Different Types of Employee Retention Strategies?
Now that you know how vital employee retention is, you’re probably wondering how to do it. Here’s a list of the different types of strategies you can use to keep your top talent on the books.
● Offering competitive wages
● Improving working conditions
● Creating a feedback system – and using it
● Developing a positive company culture focused on leadership, professional development and community engagement
● Offering bonuses and benefits that enhance the employee’s life
● Focusing on work-life balance and leading from the top
● Encouraging team building and strong relationships
● Placing a focus on employee recognition
● Offering ongoing training & development opportunities
As you can see, employee retention isn’t an overly complicated matter. The key is actively focusing on improving the employee experience any which way you can. Of course, this list could probably do with some more detail to really make the picture clearer. Let’s take a closer look at the top employee retention strategies.
What Are the Top 3 Employee Retention Strategies?
The following employee retention strategies have proven to be among the most effective for organizations of all kinds.
Offer Competitive Wages and Great Benefits
Very few of us show up to work every day just because we love it. The number one reason for working is to earn money and get good health insurance. That being so, the first thing your organization should do to retain employees is to offer competitive wages and the most desirable benefits that you can. We help our clients expand their benefit offering with additional enhancements that improve employee engagement and retention – connect to learn more.
Make Fit an Important Aspect of the Hiring Process
Some job candidates look stellar on paper. Still, all the job experience and qualifications in the world won’t matter if a candidate is a bad fit for your work culture. When developing your hiring process, be sure to make finding the best fit just as important as finding the best resume. In addition, keep your potential employees engaged in your hiring and onboarding process with a systematized approach to this process, like our iSolved applicant tracking system.
Create a Feedback System
You may never be able to get to the bottom of why your organization has such a high turnover rate until you allow its members to tell you themselves. Creating a system through which your workforce can provide feedback will not only clue you into what you’re doing wrong, but it will also show them that your organization is committed to bettering itself.
Get in touch with Asset HR to learn more about opportunities you might be missing in attracting and retaining top talent through enterprise-level technology with a family-owned and operated approach to service.