The Importance of Employee Retention– The Key to a Successful Business
A successful business needs consistency in all aspects, employees included. Having a high retention rate means keeping staff members long-term, resulting in less time and resources required for training new staff and having the loyalty needed to run a business.
Consider the amount of time, resources, and money that goes into training a new employee. Productivity will slow down due to existing staff helping out the newest addition to the team. There’s the potential of losing resources and money due to any errors that typically arise from new employees. Now, imagine going through all of that for nothing when the employee quits after a month of working.
You go through the process of screening applicants, interviewing potential workers, hiring, and training them, expecting them to remain long-term. If they end up leaving, you must repeat the whole process over again.
Maintaining your employees, as long as they are a good fit for the company, is crucial to a successful business. A low employee retention rate will hurt the organization. How do you keep your best employees around for long-term, and what employee retention strategies will work for you?
Consider Who You Hire
It all starts with who you hire. Hiring the wrong employee can go a few ways: they either quickly leave or cause existing employees to resign. Either way, you end up with a revolving door of staff and have to spend a lot of time and money hiring a new team.
As you go through the screening process of applicants, take a thorough look at their resumes. What does their work experience look like? Where have they worked and for how long? Someone who has had multiple jobs in a short amount of time might mean they still haven’t found their right fit or they aren’t very loyal to their company.
Another aspect of the screening process should include considering if they are a match for the company culture. A new employee that is not on board with the rest of the staff could soon cause problems in the office atmosphere.
Encourage Positive Work Relationships
With that being said, fostering an atmosphere in the office that encourages positive workplace relationships is crucial. If staff members cannot work together as a team, it won’t take long before they start to butt heads with one another and productivity will suffer.
When employees are connected with one another, management and human resources included, there is a better chance they will stay loyal to the organization. Developing new relationships at work can be intimidating. So, if your staff has a team mentality and everyone gets along, you’ll likely see them stick together, increasing your employee retention rate.
Learn more: What is Human Capital Management (HCM)?
Keep Communication Open
One of the biggest reason employees resign is due to the lack of communication in the organization. Whether it be employee to employee, or staff to management, having an open line of communication is a key aspect of running a business.
Employees want to know they are getting all of the correct information to do their job, so they can contribute to the business. Communication will help achieve that. Being able to communicate with management and HR is a simple way to empower your employees into feeling like they are helping the company run successfully.
Employee Retention Ideas
We know why having a high employee retention rate is essential, but how do you achieve that? One technique is through team-building exercises. These programs encourage employees to work together to solve problems in a fun and exciting way. In order to succeed, they must come together as a team. The success they see and the skills they learn throughout the process can then transfer into their daily work environment.
Since we established how important open communication is for employees, we need to know how to do that. One way is by having meetings, both team meetings, and individual assessments. A team meeting is essential for communicating ideas and issues in the company across the whole organization. Individual meetings allow for a more private line of communication and is better for those who find larger settings intimidating. Allowing time for anonymous discussion will also help with intimidated and shy employees.
