Sometimes, employees remain at a firm for a long period of time, believing that they are precisely where they are supposed to be. In contrast, some employees depart to explore alternative possibilities. Regardless of the circumstances of your firm, you probably want to keep all of your employees, whether they’ve been with you for 10 years or only a few years. Learn what employee retention is and uncover high-impact techniques that can help you in keeping your staff retention rate low by ensuring that your organization’s employee experience is up to the mark and expectations of your employees.
What is employee retention?
Retaining workers and reducing employee turnover, which is when people quit their positions for alternative options for various reasons, is known as employee retention. Increased employee retention has a direct influence on organizational performance as having more or the ideal number of employees makes it simpler to achieve organizational objectives.
Why is employee retention crucial for an organization?
Employee retention is beneficial to the growth and employee experience performance of your business. The time, effort, and expense of acquiring and training new staff are substantial, and employee turnover can have a detrimental influence on organizational outcomes. A high personnel turnover rate results in several issues, such as excessive expenses, knowledge loss, and low production.
Turnover Expenses
Costs associated with replacing employees range from 16 percent to 213 percent of an employee’s compensation. Annually, U.S. businesses incur up to $1 trillion in turnover expenditures.
Many hours are required for advertising your organization to prospective candidates, conducting interviews, onboarding, and providing training. This incurs significant costs for your company.
Lost Information
When experienced employees go, they take their expertise with them. When employees fail to impart their institutional knowledge to their coworkers, their information and abilities are at risk of being lost forever. This might result in low productivity and confusion among the remaining team members.
Obstacles to Productivity
Unfilled positions result in an accumulation of hours of lost output. When other employees replace empty positions, they may become overworked and overall productivity may decline.
In addition, it takes a considerable amount of time to get a new employee get familiar with the work of the organization. According to research, it takes a new employee one to two years to reach the same level of productivity as an established employee.
How to enhance employee retention?
How therefore may staff turnover be reduced? There is no single solution to solve this issue. Instead, you will require a multifaceted plan and employee experience culture to increase employee retention and engagement over time. Here are five ways to begin.
1. Hire the right talent
According to numerous studies, there is a significant correlation between employee engagement and employee turnover.
Compared to highly engaged employees, disengaged individuals are 3.3 times more likely to leave their business within 90 days of the poll.
Disengaged employees are 2.6 times more likely to depart the firm 180 days after the poll.
Disengaged employees are 2.1 times more likely to depart their business one year following the study than their highly engaged peers.
That is a significant investment of time and money for a few months of labor in terms of recruiting and training costs. It is crucial that organizations invest in the proper people from the initial stages. To minimize mismatches in skills and position duties, properly express your expectations and be aware of any misalignments in experience and culture.
2. Enhance the onboarding experience
Once you are satisfied that you have located the ideal candidate, it is time to onboard and train them. However, onboarding involves more than simply signing a contract, taking a tour of the office, and setting up the employee’s workstation.
According to SHRM, your onboarding process should be purposeful and last at least a year to acquire excellent retention.
The onboarding procedure should address many objectives:
a) Enhance a favorable initial impression
b) Set forth explicit expectations for their job and future in the organization.
c) Communicate first-week expectations.
d) Integrate new employees into the team and assist them in establishing relationships with coworkers and colleagues.
e) Offer new hires organized opportunities to provide input on their position, company procedures, and culture.
f) Start preparing for their company’s long-term future and development.
3. Establish a culture of feedback and recognition
Employees desire a sense of worth and appreciation for their contributions. And fostering a culture of feedback and employee appreciation may go a long way toward helping workers feel seen and heard, so decreasing their likelihood of seeking external validation.
Here are some methods to include recognition and feedback into your organization’s culture:
a) Employ yearly and employee feedback surveys to maintain a culture of constant listening.
b) Hold regular one-on-ones with staff; often assess performance, provide (and request) feedback, and discuss career advancement.
c) Create an employee experience culture and recognition program by incorporating peer-to-peer recognition, public and private praise from management, and company awards or shoutouts into your organization’s culture.
4. Develop your employees
Employees want to know that they have a future with the organization. If they cannot find it, they will search elsewhere.
Employee development is essential for attracting and keeping top talent year after year.
a) Prioritize internal promotions and hiring wherever possible.
b) Offer chances for mentoring and coaching
c) Include long-term staff objectives and growth in your routine performance discussions.
Communicate with your staff to determine their growth objectives and expectations. Where do they anticipate being in five years? What knowledge or experience do they aim to acquire? Inform them of the various options, including training, mentorship programs, and educational assistance.
5. Take action from the insights of exit surveys
You can’t prevent some staff turnover with employee experience software. However, whether your turnover rate is large or low, you may obtain valuable information from departing personnel.
Utilize exit surveys to obtain direct input from soon-to-be-former workers on the reasons for their departure and any suggestions for company improvement. You may be startled by what you discover.
Conclusion
The employee retention techniques described above are just a few approaches to boost work happiness among your team members. Be careful to frequently reevaluate your efforts. This involves keeping up-to-date on market norms for wages and benefits, as well as best practices for creating an appealing employee experience culture and fostering effective manager-employee relationships. Certain team members will depart your company sooner than you would want. However, you can at least make their choice more difficult. And if they leave your company with the knowledge that they were respected and supported, they will likely spread positive word of mouth and may even return to work for you in the future.
If you need proficient guidance regarding improving the employee retention of your organization, contact us now!
Gaurav Sabharwal
CEO of JOP
Gaurav is the CEO of JOP (Joy of Performing), an OKR and high-performance enabling platform. With almost two decades of experience in building businesses, he knows what it takes to enable high performance within a team and engage them in the business. He supports organizations globally by becoming their growth partner and helping them build high-performing teams by tackling issues like lack of focus, unclear goals, unaligned teams, lack of funding, no continuous improvement framework, etc. He is a Certified OKR Coach and loves to share helpful resources and address common organizational challenges to help drive team performance. Read More