How to Implement Employee Retention Strategies

It’s critical that you have an effective employee retention program that’s always looking for the best talent and reduce turnover rates. It’s much easier to retain your best talent than it is to recruit, train, and onboard completely new employees.

This all starts with the culture and the atmosphere within your workplace. Every company has a culture. However, creating a culture that allows high levels of retention and reduces team members walking out the door doesn’t happen on its own. It takes a huge amount of effort and collaboration from every member of your company.

This article highlights successful strategies to improve employee retention. These are strategies you can actually begin adopting almost instantly.

There’s also information regarding the importance of retaining employees and the role it plays in your overall success.

Why Is Retention Important?

There are several reasons why employee retention is important to your company. When team members want to stay put, it creates a knowledgeable and seasoned workforce. Retention also saves your organization a lot of time and money. Let’s face it, onboarding is incredibly expensive, and recruiting can be just as expensive.

The most significant reason you should improve retention is that these employees that are motivated are willing to recommend your company to other top-performers.

Strategies to Improve Retention

Employee retention strategies that are most suitable for your organization are based on what’s most important to your team members. Let’s get started.

    1. Evaluate and Address Pain Points

Do you want to know why employees want to leave? All you have to do is ask.

Gain feedback through employee surveys and one-on-one conversations. This is often the best way to keep your fingers on the pulse of how your team members are feeling regarding satisfaction. Are they satisfied enough to stay? You need to be aware of why they leave and what makes them stay.

    2. Offer Competitive Pay

Everyone knows that high salaries are attractive and help retain employees. When your current workforce doesn’t have to worry about money, they’re going to do the best job possible on a daily basis. They’ll be more into their work and look forward to coming into the office.

Having great benefits can be just as important, if not more important. This keeps your employees mentally and physically strong through primary care and mental wellness appointments. These benefits will also prevent employee burnout. If you want employee retention strategies that have an immediate impact, start with competitive salaries and benefits.

These are some of the best ways to improve pay and benefits right away:

• Understand your target employees.
• Create benchmarks for your salaries and different levels.
• Offer different levels of benefits as well.
• Encourage feedback about pay grades and benefits packages. You need to know how things are being received.

    3. Make Employee Engagement a Priority

When you want to increase retention rates, focus on improving your employee engagement. These two concepts often go hand-in-hand. Increasing one means increasing the other.

Whenever team members are engaged in their work, they’re not as likely to leave. They enjoy their jobs, they’re more productive, and they tend to spread this attitude.

Employee engagement begins with leadership that believes in taking care of team members. This means you must understand what matters most to your employees. You must listen to their feedback and take action when they have vital input.

When you have remote workers, maintaining engagement requires thinking outside of the box. Connect with them personally and keep your fingers on the pulse of what motivates them.

    4. Emphasize Leadership and Management for Retention

Poor management can harm the employee experience and ruin engagement. When your employees believe that leadership doesn’t communicate and don’t understand what’s happening on a daily basis, they’re more likely to quit.

Put effort into developing strong leadership and promoting the right managers. This is one of the best strategies for employee retention. Your employees need great leadership to look up to. This means they should have the distinct feeling that this leadership cares about their well-being.

    5. Focus On an Employee-First Culture

If you’re not sincere about building an employee-first culture, you’ll be left with a culture that’s independent, and this can be a nightmare. This turns into an every-man-for-themselves atmosphere, which is a recipe for failure.

Accidental cultures like this are cancerous and leave employees feeling unsafe, uncomfortable, and unappreciated. This is another huge reason why employees end up quitting.

The best way to improve your company culture is to pay attention to it every day. Give it the proper amount of attention, grooming it for growth so it spreads around the entire workplace.

Use strategies that create relationships throughout your organization and promote inclusivity.

    6. Prevent Burnout

There is renewed attention being placed on a proper work-life and home balance. If your company pushes team members into overdrive, this uses a high amount of energy and time. They’re left with no home life, which in turn, ends up causing burnout.

This can cause employees to leave for a company that values this dynamic. Your employees are always looking for a great workplace that will respect their personal lives. It’s your job to become this workplace.

If you want innovative employee retention strategies, pay attention to the flexibility of your workplace and work-life balance. When this is done right, your team members end up being more productive and energized.

Here are four tips to get you started:

• Consider the ways your organization promotes being flexible.
• Recognize employees for their value and not how many hours they punch the clock.
• Use different methods to find a permanent plan that can be included in your corporate culture.
• Make sure employees are aware of work-life flexibility. The best employees must lead by example but also show that downtime and home life are important as well.

    7. Offer Advancement Opportunities

Your employees need to know they’re working towards something bigger and better. The bottom line is they want more opportunities and may want to move into a management position. When there’s little room for growth, they’re likely to look elsewhere. Consider the following:

• Employees need a manager’s support in order to succeed in a large way. They are partially responsible for the development, but they need your assistance.
• Demonstrate past employees that have moved up into management positions. This is a great way to give team members the motivation they need to stick with your company.

    8. Recognition and Praise

How you celebrate employees is important and dictates the type of culture you want in your organization. Showing that you know how to appreciate your employees is one of the cheapest ways to send the message that team members are valued.

The best ways to recognize and show your employees how much they mean to your organization might be:

• Find different ways to say “thank you.”
• Think about how you like to be shown appreciation. Your team members probably feel the same.
• Encourage employees to appreciate each other.

When you use these simple strategies, you’ll notice your retention beginning to grow. It doesn’t take anything complicated to accomplish these goals – it really can be as simple as showing appreciation at the right times and encouraging employees to do the same! If you would like to improve your employee engagement and retain top talent, contact us today for a free consultation. The eLeaP continuous performance management system provides organizations with powerful options to attract and retain high caliber team members.