By Eva Wislow
You can use the most advanced technology and offer the best products or services, but the employees will still be an essence of your business. This is why almost 80% of business leaders consider employee retention extremely important or urgent for their companies.
If you want to become a successful entrepreneur, you need to gather a team of reliable and trustworthy workers. But even more importantly, you have to keep your best employees from quitting. This is not an easy task, but it is doable. In this article, we will show you 7 ways to improve retention rates.
Saving your most productive employees will not only improve your business in the long run, but it also eliminates significant financial costs. Namely, a recent study revealed that the cost of replacing high-level or highly specialized employees amounts to 400% of their annual salary. This is more than enough to make you think about keeping your best employees satisfied. Here is how you can do it.
1. Offer Training
The best employees hate routine and monotonous work, which is why you need to provide them with fresh technologies and some extra knowledge. Prepare a training session or an online course for the most valuable members of your team. That way, they will learn new things about the targeted industry and apply it in future work. As the manager, you should dedicate enough time and effort to organize all this. It can sometimes give you a headache, but it will pay off in the long run.
2. Provide Fair Financial Compensation
Some people enjoy their jobs but let’s be honest here – most of us work only to earn enough money for a decent living. Financial compensation is the primary work motive as more than a third of employees will start looking for a new job if they don’t receive a pay raise in the next 12 months. Bearing this in mind, you cannot allow yourself to cut expenses for the best workers. Reduce costs somewhere else, but don’t save money on your most productive employees.
3. Improve Communication
You should talk to your colleagues regularly and be transparent in communication. If you practice an open-minded approach, get them acquainted with your plans, and allow them to express their opinions about the business, you will build a stronger bond with the finest professionals. Don’t be an autocratic I-know-it-all type of leader. You are the one who should make the biggest decisions, but it doesn’t mean that none of the other opinions matter.
4. Adopt Internal Hiring
Most employees would love to change their positions within the same company. If you stimulate internal hiring in your company, it could protect you from losing valuable workforce. Give your current workers the chance to apply for newly-established positions and you’ll see that it will boost their engagement and productivity.
5. Encourage Creativity
The freedom to exercise creativity is one of the most important retention factors in business, especially when it comes to your best workers. Many professionals claim that they would leave for their ideal job even if it meant less pay. Allowing employees to be creative and brainstorm will bring your company one step closer to becoming an ideal workplace. You should encourage creativity and let the most proficient workers develop new ideas. It could get you valuable fresh solutions, and it will definitely increase retention.
6. Let Them Find Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance became one of the leading factors of employee satisfaction recently. You should leave enough room for your workers to discover the model that gives them the best results both in their personal and professional lives. Allow them to work remotely when needed and don’t bother them outside the working hours if not absolutely necessary. If you respect their private time, they will appreciate the job and their relations with their supervisor.
7. Give Rewards
You should reward the most fruitful workers occasionally to let them know that you respect their professional efforts. There is no need to give them huge rewards – most of the time, employees will be glad to receive even the smallest incentives like a day off from work or the front-row tickets to the basketball game. It’s not material benefits, but the moral support instead.
Employees are the core of each business and you need to make sure that the best ones stay with you for a long time. These seven tips will help you achieve this goal and make your business sustainable.
