A good team is essential assets for any business to grow and succeed. When you have a strong and dedicated team, the company also becomes strong and scales in speed. It hurts to lose a great employee. It is obvious you cannot stop an employee from leaving, but you do not feel helpless either. You need to confirm that your business is doing the right things to help drive employee job satisfaction and ultimately, retention of highly valued talent.
When you face issues with employee retention or employees leaving you, you should search for possible causes. There are many reasons apart from salary hike or monetary part.
Bad work environment
One of the most common reasons employees leave is that the job makes it too stressful to stay. When everything seems unorganized, overtime, odd work hours, extra workload or negative surroundings go out of control or mind, employees are not likely to stay long.
No development opportunities
Many employees do not just do jobs for salary or monetary benefits. But they want a career. If a company cannot provide growth and professional development opportunities, the company may struggle to retain employees.
Uninspiring company culture
Most companies keep their workspace atmosphere nice and healthy and avoid a bad environment. But all companies cannot create a dynamic work culture. When employees lack inspiration with their work and management, eventually, they will get bored and leave the company.
Poor employee pay
If there is no hike or increment in pay, it is more likely that your competitor can pay higher than you, even the best company culture won’t keep employees with you.
Lack of recognition
When employees work, and are not recognized well, the employee feels demoralized and walks out, even if the job is excellent in other ways.
Why is retaining employees so important?
When you have good employee retention strategies, you can save lots of time, energy and cost in the recruitment process. Here are some benefits of retaining employees:
Lower training costs
Every new employee needs training and time to be productive. No new employee can be productive on day one. Usually, it can take anywhere from two to six months for a new employee to be fully productive. Often new hires need help from seniors or co-workers or require an internal learning course. The better your retention rate, the less time, effort, and resources you need to invest in training new employees.
Better company culture
When employees enter and leave a company frequently, it is hard for any company to maintain a company culture. The company culture cannot be built on paper, but is transmitted directly from top level to bottom and peer to peer. To create effective company culture, you need high retention.
Increased productivity
As you know, new hires take time to be fully productive. Employees that rise through the ranks of a company have a deep understanding of its business components. They may have even strategic insight that is hard to get from new hires or outsiders. The valuable information is hard to transmit if that employee leaves the company. To maximize productivity, it helps to have great retention.
What are the employee retention strategies?
If you feel your business is at risk of losing top talent, you need to redefine your employee retention strategies. Here are some areas you can take action for that can help boost employee’s job satisfaction and increase your ability to retain those valued employees:
Mentorship programs
Mentoring new employees by pairing with a mentor is a great component to add value to the onboarding process of new comer. Mentors can offer guidance and support to new comer creates a win-win situation.
Employee compensation
When you pay competitive compensation to your employee, there is a high chance that you can succeed in retaining an employee, but that means you need to evaluate and adjust salaries regularly. If your business cannot increase pay right now, you can consider providing other forms, such as bonus, incentive. Do consider providing health care benefits and retirement plans.
Training and development
It is essential that companies should help employees identify areas for professional growth, such as learning new skills. Upskilling your employee is significant in this tech-savvy world due to constant change in technology. Companies should make it a priority to invest in employees’ professional development.
Work-life balance
A healthy work-life balance adds job satisfaction for employees. Employees need to know that their manager should know they have lives outside the work. Employees want to have their holidays and vacation uninterrupted with their office work. If any project needs late night to complete the task, consider giving them extra time off to compensate. Companies should encourage employees to set boundaries and take their vacation time.
After putting lots of effort into managing retention, some employees will inevitably leave your company sooner than they would like. But your retention strategies can make their decision a little hard. If those employees leave your company even though they were valued and supported well, they will likely say good things about your business. The bottom line is that retention can help you in many ways.
