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These days, hiring top-quality employees is only half the battle. The other half is knowing how to keep them.
Employee turnover is a constant struggle for companies, as pinpointing the specific reasons that precipitate an employee’s departure is often difficult. While turnover is one of the most important HR metrics to measure, diving deeper into knowing how to reverse the turnover tide is just as important.
The good news is that by using effective people management and strategic human resource management, you can help identify the best techniques for employee retention. Not entirely sure what that entails?
Well, if your business is one of the many wondering how to retain employees, stick with us as we go through seven employee retention strategies that can get you started.
Multiple studies show that around 20% of new hires leave within their first 45 days of employment. Maybe the role didn’t live up to their expectations, or they didn’t quite fit in with the company culture.
Other times, you might decide that your new hire isn’t a good fit, and at-will employment contracts mean that you can let them go quickly. But this isn’t good news for your reputation as an employer, nor for your hiring budget.
Hiring is an expensive business -- the cost per new hire can be in the range of $4,000, while replacing an existing position can cost you up to $15,000.
You can never be 100% sure that you’re hiring the right employees, but there are certain best practices you can follow to make sure that they not only look good on paper, but are a good fit for your business. Knowing how to create a well-rounded hiring process can save you money and help you retain the best employees.
Hiring new employees is never going to be a perfect process. However, there are a few things you can do that will help steer you toward the right hires and the eventual retention of employees.
Employee onboarding is not just about making sure your new employees are familiar with your company policies, values, and employee handbook.
Onboarding is your first chance to make a strong and lasting impression on new employees that will convince them that they made the right choice when they accepted your offer of employment.
Onboarding practices need to be meaningful, engaging, and inspirational for new employees. The way you onboard them will affect your employee retention rates; the more effective your onboarding procedures, the easier it will be to retain the loyalty of your top talent.
It’s not always easy to think outside of the box when it comes to onboarding procedures, but here are a few tips to get you started.
Believe it or not, onboarding doesn’t just apply to new hires. Continuous onboarding is the practice of creating ongoing onboarding plans for all employees throughout their tenure at a company, and consists of making sure that each employee has a well-thought-out career path that addresses their learning and development needs.
Your top employees want to know that they can develop their skills and career while working for you. Continuous onboarding plans demonstrate that organizations are not only interested in what their employees can do for them, but are also invested in doing everything they can for their employees.
Developing a "lifelong" plan for each and every employee might sound like an impossible task, but there are a few ways to make continuous onboarding an integral part of your employee retention plan.
We’ve all heard about the "death" of the annual performance review, and with good reason. Research has shown that they’re ineffective when it comes to truly recognizing employees' accomplishments, and are a poor way of determining appropriate performance measures for the coming year.
It’s no longer enough to recognize the performance and achievements of employees once per year. Employee recognition needs to be an ongoing effort of showing your employees that they’re appreciated, valued, and a necessary part of the organization.
A well-known Gallup study shows that employees are twice as likely to say they’ll quit their jobs within the next year due to a lack of recognition.
Effective employee recognition has been linked to reducing turnover, improving productivity, and building trust and loyalty within an organization.
Employee recognition shouldn’t be treated as a tick-box exercise, but there are ways of implementing employee recognition actions into your organization.
Nowadays, employees aren’t satiated with a good salary alone. Flexible working arrangements, vacation allowances, and fringe benefits are all considerations for employees weighing up whether to stay with their current company or look elsewhere for a workplace that offers them more.
Some organizations view benefits packages as a cost that they can’t afford, but, in the long run, offering employees decent benefits options will help you retain your staff.
It’s hard to know where to start when reassessing your benefits package, so here are a few pointers to get you started.
Employee disengagement breeds high turnover. When employees are unhappy at work for whatever reason, they start to look at new opportunities for employment. The worst part is, unless you detect the reason behind their unhappiness before they leave, you can’t do anything to prevent them from leaving.
Beyond employee retention, many studies have shown that engaged employees are often higher performers, and are healthier and more productive than disengaged employees.
In your own organization, there are likely pockets of disengagement that you don’t know about. By initiating some employee engagement actions, such as conducting employee surveys and soliciting feedback, you’ll uncover areas where you could improve, and potentially prevent turnover.
Engagement improves when employees feel like they’re being listened to and valued, but it’s not always obvious where you should start. Follow the tips below to get started with employee engagement actions.
At their core, stay interviews are almost the exact opposite of exit interviews. While exit interviews are used to uncover potential weaknesses in your organization, the goal of stay interviews is to get to the bottom of why your employees stay with the organization.
Stay interviews are a great way of discovering the reasons that employees continue to work for you, but are also invaluable in revealing employees' insights on areas that could be improved. As a manager, this can help you work out where to center your retention efforts.
Plus, you can compare the information gathered from stay and exit interviews to see where opinions overlap.
Conducting stay interviews will give you a good idea of how engaged your employees are, and where further steps to improve talent retention should be taken.
While exit interviews are generally more formal, stay interviews can be held with your direct reports in the same manner as your regular one-on-ones. However, to get the most out of these interviews, bear the following tips in mind.
Depending on the size of your business, you might not be in a position to take on more than one of these employee retention techniques at first. In fact, we don’t recommend that any organization try to take on all of these strategies at once.
Choose one that seems the most appropriate for your organization, and evaluate its effectiveness after a few months.
However, it is wise to revisit your overall employee retention strategies at least once a year to see where adjustments can be made to make your organization an attractive place to work.
Remember, HR software can already help you with employee retention by tracking your employees’ performance, which can inform continuous onboarding plans and help you conduct exit and stay interviews. People analytics can also help you identify the reasons for employee turnover.
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