Is your employee turnover increasing year on year? How happy are your current colleagues? If you’re wondering how to improve employee retention and inspire motivation amongst your team, this article explores some strategies you can implement into your business.
This article will explore the importance of employee satisfaction and how this impacts staff retention; it will also look at the importance of employee motivation, and furthermore employee mental health. In order to improve employee retention, we’ll list five strategies businesses can implement to improve motivation.
Why Is Employee Retention Important?
The average employee turnover rate in the UK is approximately 15% a year, costing around £11,000 per person, based on the average UK salary, and totalling £30 billion a year. However, this doesn’t include just the cost of recruitment; it also includes:
- Productivity loss
- The duration of time to reach full effectiveness
- Advertising costs
- Hiring agency fees
- Cost of equipment
With such exorbitant turnover rates and costs, there are about 30 million reasons why companies should prioritise employee retention efforts. Those that have done so in the past have seen numerous benefits of employer retention beyond mere savings on hiring and training costs. Employee retention results in better customer experience, consistency across different teams, and stronger company culture.
When your company achieves lower turnover and higher engagement, it will attract the right talent more easily, so it’s in your company’s best interest to take care of your employees and find methods for boosting retention.
How to Improve Employee Retention
There’s no universal solution to solve high staff turnover, but rather a multi-pronged strategy that will build engagement and boost retention.
Here are five strategies for improving employee retention:
Optimise the Onboarding Experience
Recruiting and hiring a potential employee is a massive investment of time and money for just a few months of work until you get a fully fleshed-out and effective employee. It’s important for companies to invest in the right hires from the start and to avoid mismatches in skills and responsibilities.
To avoid mismatches, it’s important to optimise your hiring and onboarding experience by communicating the company’s expectations clearly, while paying attention to possible misalignments in experience and work culture. Once you’re confident that you’ve found a suitable candidate, you can onboard and train them.
However, onboarding is more than just signing a contract and setting up an employer’s desk; the process alone should target several goals:
- Reinforce a positive first impression
- Set clear expectations
- Communicate the training process
- Connect the new hire to their team
- Start planning for their long-term development at the company
Provide Clear Guidance
Explain your company’s expectations to newly hired personnel, as well as your methodology for performance evaluation and the metrics and rubrics you’ll use to evaluate their work and performance. Employees must also grasp how their work affects business objectives in order to appreciate the value of their contributions.
The members of your company team are more likely to feel better about their work and driven to accomplish well if they’re presented with a clear visual of how their efforts contribute to the company’s goals. Make sure that employees who recently changed roles or received a promotion also receive the same degree of support that’s being directed to new hires and trainees.
Create a Positive and Healthy Work Environment
Improving employee retention depends on a positive and healthy work environment, and the greatest way to start establishing a better culture is through dedicated, supportive leaders. Organising team-building activities is crucial for managers to foster relationship-building and collaboration with employees.
Providing employees with opportunities to get to know one another outside of the workplace, such as team lunches or group outings, can help establish friendships and increase cooperation. Team leaders should also encourage personnel to identify and acknowledge one other’s abilities while also respecting differences.
Employees that treat one another with empathy and understanding will contribute to a positive, motivating work environment, which will improve their job satisfaction and boost business outcomes. A productive and motivated workforce is more devoted to providing high-quality results and service, and they’re less likely to suffer from stress or burnout.
Ultimately, employees are more likely to stay with an organization long-term if they build ties with their coworkers and feel supported by their team.
Invest in Employee Education and Growth Opportunities
A great number of individuals choose to leave their jobs when they start believing that there aren’t any opportunities for growth and advancement. You can reduce turnover by providing a career development program.
Supporting employees’ desire to learn new skills and improve as professionals in a variety of ways, from peer-to-peer mentoring and on-site training to financing for outside courses will help you keep your finest staff. Whatever you choose, make sure to acknowledge and reward employees’ efforts to improve their careers by giving them more responsibility and chances to practice new skills and grow.
This will help you keep high-performing personnel, which is critical for the company, as it also helps reduce turnover and boost workplace happiness, as it accentuates employee engagement and satisfaction.
Act On Exit Interviews
Some turnover is unavoidable, but you can gain valuable insight from employees on their way out the door by offering them exit surveys and interviews. That way, you can learn exactly why they’re leaving and what suggestions they may have for improving the company. It’s a useful tool for gathering information that can help you minimize turnover in the future.
Exit interviews are also quite good at promoting retention through “stay interview” tactics, in which you can discuss the employee’s experience from day one at the company and have them remind themselves why they wanted to work at your company in the first place. It also provides you with an opportunity to find out what it will take to change their mind and keep them as an employee.
Final Thoughts
It’s difficult to maintain effective, comprehensive engagement with employees of all types and hues, but it’s even more difficult and costly to replace them. Leaders and organisations that devote time to determining what employees require to remain engaged in their professions will have the best chance of retaining said employees.
In the end, a successful employee retention strategy will attract a happier, more productive team that will inspire and uplift those around them.