Wondering how to keep your employees happy and engaged at the workplace? Here are some time-honoured strategies that can help you with employee retention.
One of the biggest challenges faced by any business owner and manager is employee retention. Finding and training new employees can be very time, money and resource consuming and is definitely not easy. Employee retention means keeping your employees engaged and motivated throughout the employee’s lifecycle especially while businesses and employees recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article discusses some of the steps that have been proven to retain staff members, resulting in a happier, more productive workforce in 2022. Best of all, with the right strategies in place, you'll find it easier to manage your business better,
Employee retention is the process of keeping existing employees happy and improving employee satisfaction. This definition goes above and beyond measuring retention - It encompasses everything from employee job satisfaction, morale and productivity to reducing levels of employee attrition. Replacing an employee can cost a company between 60 and 240% of the salaries paid to that person, which means the ROI for retaining a good employee can be very high.
Employee retention is a major challenge for many businesses. It can be difficult to hold onto quality employees while also ensuring that they are happy and motivated. By putting together an effective employee retention strategy, hiring the right people in the first place, and giving them a good onboarding experience, you will be able to improve employee retention rates quickly and effectively.
Employee retention is also an important measure of an organization’s overall health, and reflects how much it values its people and whether it offers them a good “fit” with their objectives, culture, and goals.
It can be difficult to compete with the work environment and culture of established companies, but matching or offering a competitive base salary is the easiest and most effective option to attract the best talent. Competitive salaries are the first ingredient for employee retention. Without competitive salaries or other advantages, only the top talent will be retained.
While there isn’t a one size fits all approach, there are general guidelines you can follow to retain key employees and avoid losing them to competitors.
These are time tested and traditional employee retention method. However, if employees are unhappy with how the company is being run, or the company’s mission and vision does not resonate with the employees, this strategy might not really pan out as expected.
It is human nature to want to see things change. It gives us a feeling of newness, but when it comes to the workplace, sudden changes can be annoying, stressful and depressing for employees that have been with you for years. That's why the most effective transformations are based on gradual changes rather than sudden ones so your employees won't feel out of place in the environment they're used to.
A sudden change in the way that you manage your workforce can make things complicated in your office. Before implementing a new administrative policy or organizational shift, take time to think it through. Consider how each employee will react to the changes and give them enough time, support and training. Try to identify possible causes of discord and make accommodations ahead of time so that your office remains harmonious.
Wouldn’t you agree that the most important employee retention strategy is to hire the right person at the start? Hiring the wrong person can be incredibly costly and detrimental. To understand why this is the case, you need to think about how much time, money and energy it takes to train a new person.
If you don't spend much time hiring, you're likely to be inundated with applicants for every position. You might struggle to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Getting the candidate with the right attitude, who is also a great cultural fit and aligns with the mission of the company is the right way to go about it, alas it is easier said than done!
Human resource departments and hiring managers have to figure out ways to ensure that staffing turnover doesn’t cripple the company.
A great way to help retain employees is by having a well-designed onboarding program. It goes without saying that this process has to be highly individualized. The first few weeks and months are crucial when it comes to making sure your new employee has a great onboarding experience. Many employees who receive intensive onboarding, the kind where they have someone helping them learn their way around the company, filled with tools and education to fill in any knowledge gaps are three times less likely to quit than those who just check email in isolation.
When an employee starts off on the right foot, they’re more likely to stay where they’re at, especially when you’re able to nurture that relationship and keep them engaged. After all the maxim “employee is an investment, not an expense." exist to remind us of the same.
Having a group of trustworthy and dedicated employees who are willing to go the extra mile is a challenging task that every business needs to accomplish. Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), one of the “greatest employee retention strategies”, has been successful in building an environment where there is a shared sense of responsibility, commitment and ownership among all workers within an organization.
Your employees don’t just work for you; they also own a percentage of your business. This means that the more successful you are as an employer, the more money your people make in their own portfolios. Employee Stock Ownership Programs make it possible for your staff to grow their savings, earn increased income and enjoy greater financial security.
Employee burnout is an issue that affects businesses of all sizes. Whether it’s from overworking your employees or from the monotony of running day-to-day operations which can prove to be stressful. You wouldn't be surprised to know that some business still view employees as "workhorses". This archaic perspective should not just be frowned upon be also kept away as far as possible if you want to build a sustainable long term healthy work culture.
According to a study by the Families and Work Institute, 75 percent of workers have had to take a significant amount of time off due to stress, anxiety or depression. The same report found that 70 percent of people felt burned out. Employers are losing up to 135.3 billion dollars in productivity from their employees due to stress, according to a study from California Life Sciences Institute. Burnout can reduce morale and taint the reputation of your organization among employees, who will often feel as if their employer has betrayed them.
The pathway to a high employee morale? When teams play and bond together on Ricotta Games & Trivia, they see a boost in morale, almost by 300%!
One of the most important costs incurred by businesses is that of employee training and development. Retaining your top talent can be expensive, but training and development is crucial. It results in higher employee retention rates.
According to SHRM, 59% of HR professionals surveyed said that they do not offer enough training and development programs to employees at the beginner or newbie level. Training and upskilling your employees is an extremely important component of employee retention. However, businesses end up in pitfall by not creating a culture of training, not investing in training or lack of facilitators, and not measuring results.
A hybrid workspace strategy has already adopted by big companies like Google, Twitter etc. In a hybrid setting, one has the benefits of a typical office set-up (socialization, networking) and the flexibility of being at home, for example. Additionally, flexible timings also mean that people can work at their own pace and convenience. Companies that embrace a hybrid workplace are the clear winners in 2022.
Employee retention is like a loyalty program – it’s your strategy to win over the hearts and retain your employees. If done right, you can build a winning team with employees who show loyalty to your company. I hope that our insight into employee retention has been useful to you, but no matter what technique you try out, be sure to test different methods and see what works best for you. Hopefully we have helped give you some ideas on how to keep your employees happy and prevent them from leaving before their time.
It’s no secret that if a company can retain more employees, they’re going to save a ton of money in the long run by having less turnover. On top of that, keeping a skilled workforce will always improve the performance of your organization because the learning curve gets steeper. It's just a matter of finding the right retention method. From our article above, you can see that there are many retention strategies in place at successful companies, but what really works is going to depend on you and your organization.
The retention rate is calculated by dividing the number of employees who have stayed at your company at the end of a certain time period by the number of employees you started with at the beginning of the time period.
Example; let’s say Company A starts with 50 employees in 2021 and ends with 40 employees in the same year, then the employee retention rate is 80% for the said time period.
Technically, yes, a retention rate higher than 100 means that it is a negative churn rate. It indicates that more people were hired compared to the people who left the company.
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