Aiming for a reduced employee turnover rate and a much higher retention in your organization? There would hardly be any HR executive who wouldn’t share this goal with you.
Retaining your employees is one of the toughest challenges faced by human resources teams across organisations.
With the economy improving big time and the shortage of talent, the employee turnover rate would only tend to go higher.
With millennials becoming a larger part of the work force there is a higher chance that job hopping becomes much more prevalent.
Considering these aspects, here are 15 excellent tips for you to get your employees to stay with you.
Some of these may be familiar to you, though they will definitely help you motivate your best employees and get their much required loyalty.
- Make sure you hire the right person for the job
To begin with, you must make sure that you are hiring the right employees. You must be absolutely sure that the candidate you are evaluating is not just fit for the job, but also fits into your company culture. This is particularly so as an individual may be excellent on the job but may not necessarily believe in your company’s philosophy or values.
- Consider the attributes of your most successful employees
You don’t have to incur a lot of expenses to get smarter insights about how and where you get people. You just need to introspect and look at your current lot of highly successful employees. You need to map the attributes that make them successful in your organization and look for these while hiring afresh.
- Ask your non performing employees to get in sync
When required, you must be ready to let go of employees who are not necessarily falling in line with what is needed of them. There will be employees who inspite of your best efforts will not fit into your scheme of things. This may be either at work or even in terms of your organization culture, both of which can be a potentially hazardous situation for you to be in.
- Cultural fit should matter more than experience
Increasing your employee retention rate will require improved hiring efforts. You must focus on hiring candidates who are not just skilled for the role but also those who demonstrate a strong cultural fit for your organisation. With an assessment that tests them for their behavior along with a personal interview, you can make them your best hires in the long term.
- Ensure your employees get paid on par with your industry pay standards
Your employees must be paid the fair ongoing compensation or even better for the work that they do. This is probably the most obvious of tips that you may receive to retain your staff though it is the least followed practice. In fact most organisations hardly keep up with the employee’s development and hence expected increased compensation.
- Collect feedback on how your company should be run.
Yes, go ahead and ask your employees what they feel about the company and how it must be run. In today’s world where every employee is more fo a knowledge worker, everyone should have a say in how their bit of the company could be run.
- Get Social: Your employees will bond better
Ensure that you maintain an environment that promotes and allows your employees to connect with each other through social occasions. As your employees get to know each other better, they are more like to be happier and less likely to want to leave you.
- Let your employees have a say – open up the communication lines
Ask your employees what is it that matters most to them while they work for you. Get this feedback and try to implement those aspects that are absolutely necessary. You may be surprised at how much you have been missing out on. While it is true that every suggestion may not be relevant, it is still important for them to know you that they are being heard.
- Offer real time recognition to your employees
Value and appreciation of your employees go a long way in making them feel that they belong to your organization. Their success, achievements, inputs need to be recognized real time to make them even more motivated to put in further efforts. Public appreciation also goes a long way in getting your employees stay with you.
- Allow certain elements of flexibility at the workplace
Employees today, especially millennials prefer an element of flexibility that allows them to balance their work and life. This can have a direct impact on employee retention. Flexibility of work hours, ability to work from home on special occasions may make them want to stay on with you.
- How engaged are your employees? Pay attention
If you are conducting and employee engagement survey, you may want to observe the results of the same to identify engagement levels. However it may just not be enough. You need to also work on improving what isn’t working, thus building an environment of engagement by taking action on the results of the engagement survey.
- Are your employees really happy? You must find out
Employee happiness can indicate how satisfied the people working for you are. You must look at this as an investment that you will make to get solid returns in terms of better employee productivity and of course, retention. To ensure that you reduce your employee turnover rate, your employees must be happy, period.
- Give better opportunities that allow your employees to grow
For most employees, even more important than the monetary compensation would be the opportunity to learn and grow with the organization. Lack of development opportunities could also be directly correlated with a higher employee turnover rate. Aspirations are highly important and if you are not allowing them opportunities to develop, they will not want to stay with you.
- Ensure you maintain an all inclusive attitude
For your employees to be happy staying with you and even for their happiness, you must offer them a sense of purpose as well as strong goals to achieve. Rather than working to meet targets, let them see the larger picture and how their efforts are contributing towards the overall organizational objectives. This is likely to increase their sense of belonging with your organization.
- Make sure that you demonstrate and cultivate respect
Make sure that while you work towards creating a pro retention work environment you build around having a culture of mutual trust and respect. According to a survey conducted, respect was also considered to be one of the key factors that also had an impact on employee turnover. If you find better ways to build respect at your workplace, it will pay off with a better retention rate.
These 15 tips should surely help you on your mission to reduce the employee turnover rate for your organization. Are there any such tips that you are already using to good effect? Share with us in the comments.
