If you own a business, you do understand the importance of retaining your very best and the brightest employees. It is necessary to keep them happy and satisfied, so that they can stay and provide you with vital resources. Hiring new candidates for a particular profile is quite tough, especially if you are seeking the best ones. So is retaining them. Good, qualified, talented and experienced candidates tend to seek better opportunities after some time. Hence, you need to come up with solid employee retention strategies. Otherwise, your business is likely to suffer a lot.
Useful employee retention strategies to implement
- Get employee feedback: You need to be an effective listener and communicator while being proactive to get your employee feedback. This will help develop trust and strengthen employer-employee relations. It is also key to your leadership style and hence, should be made part of your business operations. Hold a one-to-one meeting with your employees. Conduct anonymous half-yearly employee surveys. This will help gauge their satisfaction level and moods with their leaders. The obtained results can be shared with all the company members. Accordingly, create an action plan. But what is critically important is the follow-through. Communicate what you intended to do with your team in advance to ensure getting valuable feedback. This will ensure that skeptical employees can offer honest feedback.
- Employee engagement & retention begins at leadership level: Employee engagement is paramount. Even a few decades ago, employee engagement was regarded as business imperative across all levels. An engaged workforce is sure to bring in positive results to the bottom-line. According to industry experts, employee engagement and retention is not likely to be much higher when compared leaders. The fact is every person employed in the organization is an employee, ranging from CEO to frontline workers. Hence, engagement should be at all levels. Frontline leaders might underestimate the kind of influence they might have on their teams’ retention and engagement levels. Leaders are to be shown their influence level over their team. Most businesses tend to keep track of leadership engagement metrics like tracking leader’s turnover rate.
- Employee growth opportunities: Money is not always the major factor for employees to resign their job. The reason often is found to be of the roles provided to them and their current work profile. Managers do play a significant role to design meaningful, motivating jobs. It might also mean trying to rotate them to do different roles in which they excel. Not getting opportunities to advance their career is cited to be another reason to leave the job. Ambitious workers should be offered in-role growth opportunities.
- Inclusive culture: Many businesses have reported losing minority professionals and women in huge numbers when compared to white and male counterparts. Employee retention challenges and high quit rates are often linked with challenges likely adapting to the workplace environment. In some cases, employees did not get much support from their managers. Hence, there should be promoted professional working conditions with each person supporting the other.
- Exit interviews: Exit interviews should be conducted in a unique and in-depth manner. It should start from the employee planning to join the company and not why they are quitting. Then aspects like what experience was gained, did it make any difference to the employee’s career and life should be discussed. You can also include ‘stay’ interviews to your employee retention toolbox. Such interviews tend to involve in-depth discussions with your employees. This will allow you to understand why they are eager to work with your company. Also, you can explore ways to retain them.
Therefore, with the right employee retention strategies, you can make smart employment brand investments.
