Preface
Attracting employees is half the battle, but once you are satisfied your workforce has good people, you also want to know how to retain your employees. It is expensive, frustrating, and leads to a loss of productivity when you are on the merry-go-round of constantly hiring new employees.
Retain Your Employees
In this article when you scroll down, we will talk about 7 of the best ways to retain your employees who are hard working and dedicated so they don’t get trained then walk out the door.
Top Reasons Why Employees Quit
To understand how to keep employees, let us look at some of the 13 biggest reasons why employees will quit a job:
- Lack of opportunities for advancement
- Low pay
- Lack of caring managers
- Disrespect from supervisors or coworkers
- Childcare issues
- Lack of flexibility
- Poor health benefits
- Too many hours of work
- Too few hours of work
- Burnout
- No sense of fulfillment
- No sense of community
- No support for mental health/mental wellbeing
So, with these reasons why workers quit in mind, lets move on to the strategies you need to use to stop the outward exodus…
7 Specific Ways to Retain Your Employees
Try these strategies to help retain your employees:
- Build a Sense of Community
- Listen to Your Employees
- Have Clearly Defined Job Duties
- Prioritize Mental Wellbeing
- Incorporate Career Path Planning
- Competitive Compensation
- Cultivate Strong Supervisors
We will go over them one component at a time…
1. Build a Sense of Community
Help employees feel like they are part of the team. Creating a sense of community and team involvement in your workforce can have a big effect on whether workers will stay at a job and remain productive employees.
2. Listen to Your Employees
Make employees feel heard. People often feel like they cannot continue to work in a job where their thoughts, ideas, and feelings have no value. Managers and business owners will be more successful in retaining employees when they take the time to hear from their employees and to really listen to them.
3. Have Clearly Defined Job Duties
Employees that feel stressed, overwhelmed, and overburdened are more likely to start looking for a new job. One reason this happens is that there are not clearly defined roles at work.
- Workers like to know exactly what they are signing up for when they start a job and the responsibilities that fall under their purview. When these waters get muddied, employees might start to feel overworked and want to look for new employment.
4. Prioritize Mental Wellbeing
Prioritize employee mental health and avoid burnout. Have realistic goals for your employees and avoid overburdening them with too many responsibilities. Make mental health an important part of your work environment, so employees want to come to work. Some quick ways to improve mental health at work are:
- Train managers to prioritize mental health. Managers who care about the physical and mental well-being of their employees will help develop an environment where employees feel welcome.
- Offer flexibility at work when possible. Allowing employees to have a flexible schedule or work remotely is an effective way of strengthening mental health. For example, working parents can feel far less stressed if they can come into work after they put their kids on the bus in the morning.
- Encourage a healthy work and life balance. You should expect employees to be dedicated to their jobs. But you should not ask them to forfeit their personal lives.
- Good managers will recognize the importance of employees taking time off from work, keeping up with outside-of-work obligations, spending time with their families, and doing enjoyable things that are not related to work.
5. Incorporate Career Path Planning
Have pathways for career advancement. People are more willing to stay at jobs where they feel like advancement is a real possibility. One way to do this is to create advancement positions and train employees, so they can fill those positions as they become available.
6. Competitive Compensation
Keep compensation competitive. Keep your working rates competitive with other businesses in your industry or market and you will attract better employees and have an easier time keeping the employees you have already hired.
7. Cultivate Strong Supervisors
And last but not least, have good managers in place. Poor managers represent a leading cause of workers leaving a job. Hiring good managers who know how to foster productivity while respecting their work staff will lead to much higher levels of worker morale and retention.
Tips to Improve Manager Performance
Here are a few tips for helping your managers perform better:
- Provide ongoing training for managers. Some employees end up in management because they are familiar with the company and have a good understanding of day-to-day operations. What they might not understand is how to manage other employees.
- Lack of training in this area can lead to many problems that you could easily resolve with guidance from your business.
- Have clear company policies. When company policies are vague or confusing, it can be hard for a manager to properly enforce rules and regulations. Give them a defined set of parameters, so they know how to respond to various situations that may arise in the workplace.
- Take time to listen. Your business management team will have a lot of information about the operation of your business. Listen to their thoughts, ideas, and concerns to have a better idea of what is working and what is not in the day-to-day business.
- Avoid putting too much weight on a manager. The mental health of your managers will reflect on your other employees. A stressed and overburdened manager will likely pass on that stress and frustration to other workers. Give them reasonable work expectations with clear deadlines.
- Give managers the resources they need. If you are expecting high-quality work from your team and managers, give them the tools they need to finish the job. That might mean innovative technology that can help them finish the work faster.
Summing Up
Remember, not only do you want to hire well but also to retain your employees who are your best workers. This post referred to 7 keys to retain those high performers. Ignore them and you will always be on a merry-go-round of hiring then losing good people.
Offer employees a sense of community, listen to your employees, have clearly defined job duties, prioritize mental wellbeing, incorporate career path planning, provide competitive compensation, and cultivate strong supervisors. If you do these you can ensure that your employees stay loyal and don’t head for the exits.
By following these tips, you can improve your employee retention rate and retain top employees in your business.
Flexicrew Support
Want to improve your employee retention strategy even further? Call Flexicrew to help create and implement your retention strategy that will help you retain top talent as long as this tight job market lingers.