As many business owners find out, retaining employees and reducing employee turnover is often much harder than hiring these employees in the first place. Even with this challenge, business owners understand that employees are a valuable investment and can become valuable assets if they can stick around for long enough. If you are a business struggling with employee retention and high turnover, here are a few tips that can help.
Hire the Right People
Research has found that there is a strong relationship between employee retention and employee engagement. Employees who are not fully engaged have a higher desire to leave their employers as soon as they can or when they find better opportunities.
To eliminate this disengagement, businesses should be careful to hire the right people. This does not mean making the hiring process more rigorous but instead tweaking it so the business can find the right people for the positions they need to fill.
Avoiding mismatches in skills and the job requirements, communicating employer expectations and paying attention to any misalignments between skill, experience and company culture are all important ways of avoiding disengagement in the future and reducing employee turnover.
Provide Opportunities for Employee Development
All employees want to feel like they have a future at the organizations they work for. If they don’t feel like they do, they will often look for this assurance at other companies. Employee development is key because it helps employees feel like the organization is investing in their future and this is the main reason why providing opportunities for employee development is important for the engagement and retention of employees.
Investing in the training and development of your employees also helps the organization reduce its in-house skill gaps while increasing satisfaction and engagement. The main challenge with employee development is that it requires time, a budget and people with expertise to be engaged with these training programs.
Businesses that do not have any of these available can hire companies that provide employee training and development as part of their outsourced human resources management services. Companies like G&A Partners provide human resources management services to companies that need tailored training programs that are aligned with both the company’s and employees’ needs for the best outcomes. They even arrange online training sessions to ease the burden of in-house training.
Create a Culture of Feedback and Recognition
Everyone feels good about being praised for something they do right. This applies to employees too who feel appreciated and valued for their contributions if there is a system of earned praise in place. A culture of feedback and positive criticism can also help employers feel seen and heard, and help them understand what they have not done right so they can improve in the future. This makes them feel validated and that the company cares about their improvement.
Continuous listening, regular one-on-one meetings, and creating recognition programs are all great ways of integrating a culture of feedback and recognition into the workplace.
Attracting, hiring, and training top talent is never easy. Retaining top talent to avoid going through this cycle is important, especially for businesses that do not have the time or budget to keep hiring all the time.
