When it comes to ensuring your company has the very best employees, your mind might go directly to recruitment. While it’s true that finding amazing candidates is an essential part of human resources, the truth is that it’s only the beginning of a long and complex process of making and keeping hires.
Employee turnover can be a huge problem for companies when left unchecked. High turnover rates can be:
Costly: Constantly having to spend resources on recruitment will drain your accounts and leave you feeling frustrated.
Disruptive: Covering for missing people or training new hires can take a ton of time and keep your eyes off the prize.
Detrimental to team morale: Why are so many people leaving? Should I consider jumping ship, too? These are the questions that might start to pop into your employees’ minds if they see teammates frequently leaving shortly after they’re hired.
To ensure that your top talent remains committed and productive, it’s crucial to implement effective strategies for retention. Here are five strategies for reducing turnover within your company.
Understand Why Employees Are Leaving
It’s essential to understand why people are leaving. This can be learned through a number of ways but is most easily obtained through an exit interview. During exit interviews, people have no real reason to lie or hide things, so they tend to be quite honest in explaining why a different opportunity seemed more suitable.
Once you find out why people are leaving, you’ll be able to combat that problem. But until you have that information, you’re just guessing. Are your compensation and benefits packages not competitive enough? Did employees feel a lack of recognition or a lack of work-life balance? Maybe you have a flaw in your hiring process and didn’t clearly communicate the role the person was taking on. Gather real data as to why people are leaving your company to make analytical decisions going forward.
Implement a Robust Onboarding Process
Onboarding is the first interaction an employee will have with your company after they’re hired. It sets the tone for the entirety of your working relationship. That’s why it’s so important that your onboarding process captures the culture of your company, the tasks you’re asking the employee to take, and the perspective of how those tasks fit into the company’s overall goals.
During onboarding, assign new employees a mentor or buddy that can help them acclimate to your office. By giving someone a more direct link than their manager or HR department, employees might begin to feel more embedded into your company’s structure and start to put down firmer roots. They also have someone they can go to quickly with questions or concerns. People who feel like they have real relationships at work are much less likely to leave for greener grass elsewhere.
Foster Long-Term Career Development
Does your company offer long-term career development for its employees? Ensuring that workers feel their career can take them somewhere is an essential puzzle piece when it comes to retaining top-tier talent. The kind of people you want working for your company are go-getters—they want to know that they’ll be supported if they try to reach the next level of their careers.
This can look different from company to company, but there are a few ways you can get started if you’ve never considered career development for your employees. First, focus on training and development: by offering ongoing training seminars and workshops, you can help employees sharpen their skills and stay updated with industry trends. Do these things take time and money? Yes—but not as much time and money as the recruitment you’ll have to engage in if your employees leave. Besides, helping employees grow their talents will only benefit your business in the long run!
Second, consider implementing a career-path program, where employees can work with management to create clear career paths and development plans. Try to see how those career paths can align with your company’s needs.
Last, whenever possible, try to promote from within to demonstrate to employees that there are real opportunities for career progression within your organization.
Rapidly Address Serious Concerns
If employees are having an issue, do they feel like they have a path toward resolving it? Who can they go to with complicated questions or concerns? If they do have a person to go to, how quickly are those concerns solved?
There are three main steps to helping employees resolve concerns. The first is that you need a clear process; every employee should know where to go if they have an issue with a colleague or their workflow. Second, timeliness should be emphasized—we’ve all heard horror stories of HR departments dragging their feet on problem solving until employees simply give up and accept that this is simply the way things are. Third, your company should have a culture of accountability. Solving complex issues and serious concerns will ensure that all employees, including HR and management, are held accountable for their actions and behaviors.
Support Employee Well-Being
Do you have systems within your company that allow for your employees to live rich, full lives? The truth is, in our modern era, people are no longer giving their entire lives to their jobs. They want to know that they’re respected at work, and while they want to be mission-oriented and hardworking, they also want a life outside of that job.
For most businesses, that means ensuring that your benefits package and time-off offerings are generous. Having robust wellness programs, teambuilding programs, or mental health support is essential, too. Work has become a much more holistic environment, caring for the whole person and not just what they monetarily bring to the table. If people don’t feel healthy and cared for at work, it’s highly likely that they’ll seek those things elsewhere.
Claire Swinarski is a Contributing Editor at HR Daily Advisor.