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Even when your employees appear happy and thriving, working to retain top talent should be a top priority for any business. Losing employees not only disrupts the workflow, but also adds unnecessary costs to replace each worker.
There are many ways to retain great employees. I’ve compiled 10 proven ideas to help you get started. These ideas can help you build a thriving work culture, reduce turnover, and improve your bottom line. Let’s dive in.
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Why Is Employee Retention So Important?
Employee retention is important for many reasons. For one, long-term employees have a better sense of the business, which helps with growth. They spend months and years gaining knowledge about the inner workings of your business and can often offer up suggestions and solutions to help further the collective goals of the company.
In addition, the longer your employees stick around, the better their overall engagement, which also raises productivity rates and saves you money. They’ll be able to grow into their roles and build collaboration, which allows you to cultivate a supportive environment for everyone.
Another reason is that replacing employees is a costly expenditure. Studies suggest that replacing a worker can cost anywhere between 30-100% of the annual salary of the person leaving. You have to spend the time recruiting, interviewing, and training a newbie, which takes time away from growing the business in other meaningful ways.
10 Employee Retention Ideas
1. Provide Flexible Working Arrangements
One of the biggest impacts you can have for your employees is offering them flexible working arrangements. While this concept has always been popular, it is even more so post-pandemic. Because flexibility is one of the top things employees are after now, offering alternative working arrangements helps give you a competitive edge for top employees.
Some common examples include offering:
- Remote or hybrid options: Allowing employees to work-from-home at least a few days of the week.
- Flexitime: Employees can decide their own start and finish times within reason.
- Compressed workweeks: Compacting 40 hours into four days, instead of five.
- Job shares: One full-time position split between two people.
2. Create a Value-Driven Culture
According to the World Economic Forum, 61% of global workers now seek out businesses that align with their values or beliefs. Amongst these values include things like environmental sustainability, brand transparency, and commitment to diversity and inclusion.
You can run a business people want to work for by promoting strong values and adapting to new ideas. Get input from employees on what they’d like to see the business do and put those ideas into action.
Maybe it includes getting involved in the community through team-building volunteer days or company sponsorship of local activities. Or reducing environmental impact through cleaning up the supply chain and promoting transparent marketing. No matter how you do it, it’s important to find ways to make your business a place that aligns with peoples’ values.
3. Offer Career Development
Employees are more likely to stay in a job if they are engaged and believe there is clear, upward mobility. Career development can come in many forms and should be personalized to meet each employee where they are at. However some ideas for career development include:
- Setting funds aside to allow employees to take external professional development courses and certifications to gain new skills.
- Creating a clear leadership pathway within your organization to foster growth and fasttrack people toward management roles.
- Cross-training staff so people across teams can assist with a variety of different projects and build professional relationships.
- Establishing a mentorship program to help pass industry knowledge from seasoned employees to newbies.
These efforts demonstrate a concerted effort to provide your employees with the skills they need to stay engaged, focused, and hopefully stick around for the long run.
4. Focus on Good Management
Employee retention starts at the top. People don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers – as the saying goes. A good manager is someone who is able to effectively lead and support their team to achieve common goals, while maintaining a positive work environment.
Managers should balance delegation and support. It’s about finding the balance of providing staff with the tools they need, without being overbearing – in most cases.
Spend some time working with your managers to cultivate leadership skills to help their teams succeed and grow. Focus on honing skills such as communication, adaptability, emotional intelligence, and prioritization.
5. Make Communication a Top Priority
Since most people spend roughly 40 hours a week at work, they want it to be an enjoyable place to go. By fostering a positive work environment, your employees will enjoy coming to work each day. You can set your business up for success by encouraging clear communication between everyone.
This means that you need to be open and transparent about high-level company decisions, to help your employees understand the overall direction of the company. Additionally, seek out and implement ideas from employees at all levels. Encourage open communication, which makes employees feel valued and also can lead to some great results.
6. Praise and Recognize Good Work
All employees want to feel valued at their workplace and there is no easier way to do that than through recognizing and rewarding good performance. Acknowledging your employees’ hard work can go a long way in keeping them motivated and engaged.
Recognition and rewards come in many shapes and sizes. It can include everything from monetary bonuses to simple public recognition of a job well done. Give shout outs to employees in company-wide communications, offer gift cards for meeting certain KPIs, and encourage others to praise their peers as well.
7. Offer Comprehensive Compensation
To retain the best staff, it’s essential to understand market salaries for your industry and the roles you're recruiting for. Even if you can’t afford top-tier salaries, you’ll still need to ensure your employees feel valued and adequately compensated.
Benefits are an additional aspect of overall compensation and can often make up for less competitive salaries. Things like paid time off, family leave, health insurance, retirement matchings, bonuses, and more can enhance an otherwise average salary.
Additionally, if your overall compensation is still less than competitors, you should implement other tactics on this list to sweeten the deal. Some employees are willing to accept lower salaries for more flexibility, for instance. Keep that in mind when recruiting or renegotiating with employees.
8. Prevent Burnout
Burnout is often one of the biggest reasons employees leave a job. Burnout can affect anyone and causes lack of energy, negative emotions, and demotivation – which can be tough to overcome. Working to reduce burnout before it happens can help employees feel valued and more likely to stick around. You can reduce burnout by:
- Ensuring staff have appropriate workloads, without feeling overwhelmed
- Setting clear deadlines and expectations for projects and tasks
- Encourage employees to use their allotted vacation time without guilt
- Providing access to an employee assistance program (EAP)
- Respecting people’s time away from the office by limiting after-hours communications
9. Emphasis Teamwork
Often one reason people leave is that they feel siloed within their specific role within a company. This is often because they have a very specialized skill that they were hired for with little interaction with other team members. Building a community within your workplace helps employees find value and meaning through teamwork.
Find ways to have cross-team collaboration, whenever possible. This may be through work-specific projects or wider company initiatives. For example, if you have a social committee or a sustainability committee, make sure to get people from every team involved in those efforts.
However, it’s also important to balance collaboration with productivity. For instance, too many meetings has been shown to decrease productivity and overall employee satisfaction. So when encouraging teamwork, ensure it doesn’t supersede day-to-day responsibilities.
10. Check Cultural Fit Before Hiring
It’s important to try to get employees to stay long-term, but only if they are truly the right fit for your business. Consider longevity when hiring new employees by looking at more than just their specialization.
Even if someone has the necessary skills to fit a specific role, it doesn’t mean they fit the culture of your workplace. Be completely honest about the job when recruiting. Make sure the job description accurately matches the actual role and highlight company values to attract the right people.
When hiring, you should also evaluate how well someone will mesh with the team and the company as a whole. A great way to do this is to offer prospective employees the chance to meet with an existing employee for an informal coffee chat. This allows for a frank and transparent conversation to help both parties determine if the company is a good fit.
The Benefits of Working with Pay.com as Your Payment Service Provider
Pay.com offers you a flexible and comprehensive payment infrastructure, no matter what type of business you run. Our intuitive platform takes the complexity out of payment processing. You can make your employees’ lives easier by switching away from a complicated and bloated system.
With Pay.com you can:
- Select from a variety of popular payment methods like digital wallets, credit and debit cards, and more.
- Choose between no-code solutions or advanced APIs to create a custom checkout experience straight on your website.
- Benefit from additional payment options such as direct Pay Links you can send directly to your customers.
- Take advantage of the robust security measures including Level 1 PCI DSS compliance and 3D Secure 2.0 authentication for card transactions.
- Enjoy a simple flat-fee payment structure, with no hidden fees.
You’ll be able to do it all through the Pay Dashboard – an easy-to-navigate platform where you can pull reports, view transaction history, and deal with refunds quickly and without hassle.
Click here to sign up for Pay.com now!
The Bottom Line
By implementing these ten strategies, you can create a positive work environment, foster employee engagement, and ultimately reduce employee turnover. This will help you grow a skilled employee base that can take your business to the next level, while also saving you time and money.
Pay.com is another great way to help your business grow. You can create a custom checkout process that boosts customer experience. You’ll be able to choose from a number of popular payment methods to provide your customers with the freedom to choose. Plus, with security as a top priority, our 3D Secure 2.0 support help mitigate the risk of fraud.
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