Key employee retention is critical to the long-term health and success of your business. Retaining best employees ensures customer satisfaction, product sales, satisfied coworkers and reporting staff, effective succession planning and organizational knowledge and learning.
As job hopping is increasingly becoming the norm, thanks in part to a workforce comprised of more millennials who are likely to have twice as many jobs over their lifetimes as their predecessors, the baby boomers, let’s take a look at some key takeaways on how you can retain your best employees.
- Competitive Salary And Benefits
Surveys across the world have shown that for employees who quit, the top reason is salary. This reason has been followed by career advancement opportunities, better benefits and location.
Financial stability motivates people to stay in a job, that’s human nature. Apart from this, health care and insurance concerns also add to the list. What you offer your employees must be comparable to other businesses in your industry.
- Have The Right Person From The Start
Glassdoor studies have found that employers hire with an expectation at the back of their minds that more employees will be quitting within a year anyway. If you hire a quitter, don’t be surprised if they quit. New hires will stick around longer if they were better informed during the hiring process. A poor onboarding experience for a new hire builds a foundation of negativity in the new job.
- Decrease Employee Painpoints
If your employee feels like she spends most of her life working instead of living, the job becomes the bad guy. You can’t expect employees to function like robots. When an employee’s work and life balance is distressed, there’s pain.
Take the aviation industry as an example. Airlines always struggle with pilot shortage and a looming retirement wave of seasoned pilots. They work on solutions like – offer better salaries and tempt pilots away from other airlines or from corporate aviation.
Through surveys, feedback or paying attention to industry trends, find out what is the points of frustration are for your employees. Think of those pain points as the most important things that need to be alleviated. Some solutions are money, family-friendly schedules, leaves and holidays and certain organizational changes if required.
- Be Stable And Organized
Provide work schedules regularly and in advance so your employees can plan their personal lives. Have a good handbook and stick to it, treating all employees and situations equally and fairly. Employees don’t stick around for chaos and drama.
- Keep An Eye On Your Managers
People leave managers, not companies. People follow as they’re led, and a bad manager creates a negative mess all around. So, while you’re taking the time to train your manager to deal with the technical aspects of their positions, it’s in your best interest to include some “soft skills” as well. This means teaching your managers how to encourage and motivate different types of people, personality traits, conflict management, stress management, crisis management and so on.
- Employee Engagement Is Key
Disengaged people actively look for different jobs. The same thing happens with employees. Distraction is associated with motivation problems. As an employer, you need to understand what motivates people to want to become fully engaged with the work they do. Offer them valuable learning opportunities. Help them grow and expand, not simply get better at what they already do. If your training centers completely rely on increasing performance in a current role, you’re missing the point. Consider cross-training programs so employees have a broad skill set, not just a narrow set limited to their specific job, mentorship programs that encourage mentee to become mentor, create a leadership ladder so employees know what they need to do to move up.
- Give Employees Opportunities To Suceeed
People have a deep desire to feel they’re succeeding and that their talents and capabilities are being used in a way that makes a difference to the business. It’s not enough for you to give vague feedback. Your employees actually want to see the results of their work. They want to have that concrete object that they can rest their pride on.
- Be A Brand They Can Be Proud Of
With upcoming generations who want every aspect of their lives to be part of a solution instead of a problem, find a way that your business can fit a good reputation. Employees who are passionate and care about the impact their lives have on the world will consider working for a positive branded business a serious benefit.
Just remember that your employees aren’t automatons, chugging along only for a paycheck. They care about where they work, how they work and who they work with. When competing in a tight job market, it’s important to keep that in mind instead of getting in an unwinnable wage bidding war that could wipe out your bottom line.
Source- Social Media, Written and published on LinkedIn by Arihant Patni-Managing Director at Hive Technologies
