Improve Employee Retention Using These Key Strategies

Improve Employee Retention Using These Key Strategies

In the past couple of years, millions of people have been quitting their jobs en masse due to numerous reasons such as bad pay and poor working conditions.

A lot of workers were leaving their jobs due to things such as low salaries, non-competitive perks/packages, feeling overworked, lack of career advancement opportunities, poor work/life balance, and much more.

In this article, we’ll be exploring and detailing some of these key employee retention strategies to help maintain employee retention in the long run, and make sure they don’t experience some of the issues we mentioned above.

Orientation and onboarding

A recent survey showed that around 69% of employees are more likely to stay at a company if the onboarding process was great. It’s important to nurture and guide every new employee you hire for long-term success.

Besides instructing your new hires on how to perform their job role, you should also familiarise them with your company’s culture and the different ways they can develop and grow at your business. Establishing a strong mentoring relationship with your new employees is crucial and is indicative of what their journey and long-term career evolution will look like at your business.

Mentorship programs

An essential part of the onboarding process is assigning a mentor to your new hires. This is especially useful if they are working remotely. They can help the new employees by guiding them through all the ins and outs of their job position and familiarising them with the company. Both parties can learn something from each other.

The mentors gain a new perspective from the new employees and the employees get to learn the ropes. Assigning mentors shouldn’t be exclusive to just new hires. They can be useful for existing staff and can help job satisfaction and employee retention.

Employee compensation

An important part of employee retention is consistently evaluating and adjusting your employees’ salaries. If you don’t pay your workers competitive salaries and compensation, your risk losing them to the competition.

Improve your employee engagement

Improve your employee engagement in less than two minutes

Get started for free today.

Free sign up

If you can’t afford to offer competitive compensation by increasing their salaries, consider offering them bonuses instead. Things like health care benefits, retirement plans, and gym memberships, amongst other things can help maintain employees’ job satisfaction.

Perks

Introducing great perks is an effective way to attract new employees and always ensure employee retention with your existing team members. In fact, 80% of surveyed workers prefer a job with great benefits over a higher wage. Some of the most sought-after perks are flexible schedules and the choice to work remotely. Parental leave is also a highly valued perk that was mentioned by surveyed employees.

Wellness offerings

It’s always a good long-term investment in ensuring your worker’s health, be it mental, financial, or physical.  As some of you may have heard, there was a huge fitness boom during the pandemic, which has made employees more demanding of things like gym memberships.

Some other examples of perks designed to maintain your employees’ health include stress management programs and retirement planning services. Making sure your workers feel like they are being taken care of by their company is crucial.

Listen to your employees

A huge part of ensuring employee retention is listening to their feedback and needs, and doing so on a regular basis. Feedback programs are estimated to raise employee engagement at around 60% whereas those without are at around 45%.

Asking for feedback from your employees at a frequent rate, even when it’s separate from the engagement program can also boost engagement. Employees feel more valued and appreciated when you are listening to their feedback at a regular rate. It also creates opportunities for collecting useful ideas and information on how to improve your company.

Communication

Establishing effective communication channels is crucial, especially in the day and age where remote and hybrid work has become more and more normalized. Employees should be encouraged to submit concerns, questions, and ideas when submitting direct reports.

You need to ensure that there’s always constructive, encouraging, and honest feedback between your team members. A big part of using these communication channels properly is being connected with your team so you have a grasp on their thoughts about their job satisfaction and how they feel about their workload.

Continuous feedback on performance

A lot of companies are switching from doing annual performance meetings to doing more regular team meetings where they discuss how everyone is doing. When conducting these meetings, it’s good to establish both your workers’ short-term and long terms goals for their careers at your company should be. You can discuss potential scenarios for career advancement and formulate an achievable plan on how to hit those goals. It’s essential for building a positive team culture.

Training and development

An important part of giving consistent feedback to your team is helping them grow professionally and offering advice on which areas they need to work on and what skills they need to learn. Consistently teaching them new skills is essential in the modern-day work environment that’s ever-changing and requires people to adapt to new technology. Your workers need to evolve in parallel to modern business requirements.

Your employee’s professional growth and development should be one of your top priorities. Upskilling is key to ensuring they become a long-term employee. Things like organising time for virtual conferences, paying for their continued education, and tuition reimbursement are great investments for their and your business’s long-term prospects. To help build leadership skills and encourage professional development, it’s good to implement some kind of succession planning.

Cloud computing can be a powerful tool for improving productivity and collaboration within your organization. One of the advantages of cloud computing is that it allows for the sharing and editing of documents in real-time, making it easier for your team to work together on projects.

However, it’s important to be aware of potential security risks and to take steps to ensure the safety of your company’s data.

To promote the growth and development of your employees while also leveraging the benefits of cloud computing, you may consider offering training programs that teach best practices for working with cloud-based tools and software. You might also encourage your team members to explore new cloud-based technologies and platforms on their own time, as this can help them develop new skills and stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry.

By taking a proactive approach to employee development and staying informed about the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing, you can help your team achieve long-term success.

Reward system

Rewarding your workers’ continuous hard work is key to making them feel appreciated and encouraged to remain at your company. Even a simple “thank you” to the people that put in that extra effort can make a big impact and helps them understand how essential they are to your business.

Reward systems for employees that suggest useful ideas are great incentives to encourage innovation. Even with a limited budget, you can still set up lucrative recognition programs for your small team.

Maintaining work-life balance

It’s crucial to communicate the idea to your employees that while you value the time they put into their work, you also value and respect their free time as well. Expecting them to be available to work 24/7 throughout the entire week can create a toxic environment and be obstructive to a healthy work-life balance.

You need to acknowledge that they have their own life outside of work. This balance can be even more challenging in the advent of remote work, and establishing work boundaries at home is crucial. Remind them not to neglect their vacation time and if they are required to work extra or late hours, make sure to compensate them with extra time off.

Flexible work arrangements

In this post-pandemic world, a lot of people have become used to and even prefer working remotely. Businesses had to change dramatically the way they operated. Offering hybrid schedules and remote work for your employees is a big plus and is more likely to maintain employee retention. They’re more likely to leave or be unsatisfied with their job if you don’t offer more flexibility.

Surveys showed that workers that were forced to return to their office after the pandemic had died down would rather just look for a different job than have to commute to work every day.  Things like compressed workweeks, flextime, partial telecommuting option, and hybrid schedules are all great methods to increase employee retention and job satisfaction.

Effective change management

The need to be able to change and adapt to different work environments has never been more important in the volatile landscape of the post-pandemic world. It’s crucial to display good leadership qualities for your workers to look up to during these uncertain times.

It’s key to keep your workers in the loop whenever major changes are undergoing at your company. It quells anxieties and fears and makes them feel less uncertain about their future at your company. Make sure to give consistent updates on the situation on an individual and group level, and ensure you give them time to ask questions.

Emphasise teamwork

It’s crucial to foster an environment where everyone is incentivised to offer ideas and thoughts to different problems or situations, not just the big members of your team. Teamwork is important to create a work culture where everyone feels like they are valued and contributing.

It gives a sense of belonging and a desire to remain long-term at the company. A big part of that is accommodating different types of work styles that are suited for each employee.

Acknowledge milestones

A good strategy for maintaining employee retention is acknowledging their achievements and milestones. It can be anything from finishing before a deadline or a worker’s anniversary at the company. Either way, never miss a chance to acknowledge and celebrate these achievements together with your crew, be it in person or virtually.

Understand your employees

Understanding your employees’ needs and feedback can have a direct impact on employee satisfaction and is a crucial quality of a good manager. The more satisfied they are, the more likely they will remain at your company. If they have complaints or desires on things they want to be changed or improved at the workplace, you need to not only listen carefully to what they have to say but make sure you act as well.

Implement the ideas or suggestions they have to improve the workplace environment. Show them that you’re not just all talk. A lot of data from surveys shows that listening without taking action results in worse engagement and job satisfaction compared to if you don’t ask for feedback at all. It just lets your team know that you’re not listening and you’re just going through the motions for the sake of appeasing them. That’s the key difference between listening and understanding.

Take the holistic approach

Employee burnout was a widespread issue in the post-pandemic work culture which resulted in a lot of people leaving their job because they were not able to cope with the stress. What was the reason behind this?

Since a lot of people were working from home at the time, it created situations where they wouldn’t shut off from work due to having direct access to it even from home. This lead to a lot of exhaustion and burnout. It’s important that as their employer you set clear boundaries and lines so that the people at your company maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Encourage them to plug it off after they’ve ended their shift. A good policy that a lot of businesses have adopted is giving employees they feel are starting to burn out a recharge day/week. This gives them a much-deserved rest and recovery period.

In Summary

Hopefully these tips and advice that we’ve gone over will be useful in helping maintain employee retention at your company. Work culture in the post-pandemic world has been very volatile and unpredictable and it’s very common for a lot of people to change their jobs frequently and not remain at a single job for long.

By having a deeper understanding and appreciation as to why exactly this happens, you can implement the necessary actions so that your employees are happy and satisfied with their jobs.

About the Author

Nikola Baldikov is an SEO magician with a passion for helping businesses succeed. He is the founder of InBound Blogging, where he specializes in SEO and content strategies. He has worked with companies of all sizes and has helped them achieve their online goals. In his free time, he enjoys playing football and dancing.