Top 5 Employee retention strategies
As a business you’ve spent countless hours in the hiring, training and developing your employees for their roles, investing time and effort into getting them up to speed and teaching them about the company. And for good reason: Your business’s livelihood depends on their performance.
But when an employee leaves, you’re back to square one: recruiting, training and teaching all over again. And the process isn’t easy or inexpensive and uses lots of internal resource from within the business.
So how exactly do you get employees to stick around? Here are five tried-and-tested tactics.
- Develop their potential
From day one you should outline their development potential and professional goals and use these to create a structured development plan. Be honest and open about what they can achieve and how you will support them in doing this. Have regular development meetings to discuss where you are with the plan.
- Create a strong company culture
By creating a positive atmosphere within your workplace this will help to preserve your company culture. It is essential to understand the type of person you require for your business to succeed and base your hiring decisions on those..
Even when a candidate has the right skills, never hire that person if he or she doesn’t fit the existing culture.
- Highlight individuals
It is important that employees understand the importance of their contribution to the business. This is usually much easier for start-ups when teams are much smaller so people have a direct input into decision-making. As you grow, however, every role is not as essential, and some employees might have trouble seeing the direct impact of their contributions.
It is important to hold regular team meetings to talk about company objectives, and tie these goals to each department and to junior staff members, specifically. You might need to spell out how they directly contribute to your company’s success to keep them engaged.
- Lead well
Every business needs a plan and direction but it also needs someone to show others the way. Employees value good leadership and management, which is why it is important to have strong leaders as your business grows. Leaders who don’t live up to their promises or who fail to execute on a vision can lose loyalty and valuable employees.
Encourage all leaders in your company to set realistic expectations and over-deliver on promises. Back up words with action, and empower staff members to take responsibility for their roles and contributions.
And above all, be honest. Your staff deserves to know what’s going on, whether it’s good or bad.
- Monitor your performers
Most of your high-performing employees will receive unsolicited offers to leave your company, often for better pay and benefits. The question is: How do you not only identify, but also neutralize, potential flight risks early on?
Regularly check in with top performers to make sure they’re happy with their roles, clear development plans and good benefits packages. And consider implementing some type of monitoring system. If an employee is unusually active on LinkedIn or his productivity suddenly changes, he might be a flight risk.
Hiring the right people is your biggest hurdle and must be done from the off set to ensure you build on your company culture with the right people. If you have talented staff members who fit with your culture, it’s likely that most of them will want to stay with your team and grow with your business.
You must continue to develop employee’s skills, acknowledge their contributions and empower them with leadership opportunities to have the best chance at keeping them around.
For more useful recruiting and employment articles from The Works Recruitment browse the rest of our website