What Are Some Ways To Retain Employees? Why should you care?
A recent study suggests that the direct costs of replacing an employee can reach as high as 33% or more of their annual salary. The same study concluded 75% of the causes are avoidable for most employers. Think about that for a minute. It’s why the employee retention rate is vital.
Even large companies can struggle with the best ways to retain employees but through our own experience and research, we discuss ways to improve your employee retention policies, enhance your employee retention strategies and reduce employee turnover.
Invest in Management Training
Employees leave managers not companies. There are countless stories of employees quitting because they could not stand their direct boss even though they liked the company otherwise.
By training your managers in skills related to managing employees with management courses, your teams you will increase the likelihood of employee retention
This means teaching them how to deal with stress, conflict, and crisis management as well as motivating different types of personalities to get the best of them.
Set Expectations From The Start
Employees want clear standards, goals, and direction, this reduces confusion and heightens productivity. Pay special attention to employees’ work planning and make sure you’re using their skills to their maximum advantage
Set achievable expectations or face eventual turnover.
Promote the Right Employees
Simply promoting someone based on seniority, or worse promoting your friends, is an ineffective way to build a team and can show disrespect to your top talent.
Often turnovers happen due to weak leadership teams, talented engineers look for leaders they can respect and look up to.
Promote the people that lead by example, work hard, make valuable contributions, and demonstrate leadership potential by inspiring those they work with to do their best. This is one of the best ways to retain employees.
Remove Underperforming Employees
Sometimes the best way to retain employees is to terminate the bad apple. No one wants to work with the person that is barely doing enough to get by, and keeping underperformers on staff will walk the real talent out the door.
Poor performance isn’t the only productivity loser on the team, the negative talkers, gossipers and bad managers will do just as much damage.
Cut the toxic people holding your team back and watch them go!
Ensure Competitive Pay Rates For Your Employees
Have you conducted a recent market study to compare against your current salary ranges? How do they line up? At the end of the day, employees want to feel appreciated and money is an important piece of the equation.
Your engineers know their worth and if you are underpaying them, they will reach out to engineering staffing agencies and search for other companies that will pay them their value.
Don’t forget about performance-based raises for key engineering players; show them that you appreciate their efforts.
Organize Summer Fridays
Open to nontraditional perks? Ever heard of Summer Fridays?
Summer Fridays are a type of flexible scheduling where employees can leave early on Fridays or take the whole day off. You could for instance have four (9) hour workdays and a one (4) hour (half day) Friday.
Some of the best ways to retain employees don’t involve money and may give you an edge when looking to attract or retain top technical talent.
Invest in professional development
Many types of IT & engineering talent are hard to retain even in a down market.
Investing in an employee’s professional development is a sound piece of the puzzle when developing an overall employee retention strategy. This could be in the form of workshops, learning conferences, or employer-paid online courses.
If you have an office in another country, you can give your employees an opportunity to relocate and work in an international setting, which can help develop their skills and accelerate personal growth.
To make the transition seamless, you can learn more about firms that specialize in global relocation services.
If you don’t offer career development learning opportunities and ways for your employees to grow, the employee may seek out employers who do.
Create monthly outings for team building
Some ideas include:
- Volunteering
- Cook-offs
- Office trivia
- Karaoke Nights
- Sports activities such as bowling, golf or go-cart racing
- Escape rooms
- Hiking
- Ballroom dance group classes
Celebrate Employee Milestones
Whether large or small, acknowledging milestones gives an employee a sense of belonging, you can recognize work anniversaries, birthdays, or perhaps a great week of sales with food and fellowship.
For example, if you’re part of a remote team, you could create a birthday video message for each of your employees.
Hire Right The First Time
Set expectations in the interview, explain the day-to-day duties in great detail. Don’t sugarcoat the position. If some difficulties or challenges come up often, you want a candidate to know about them.
It’s better not to hire the candidate at all than have them quit in the first 8 months of starting the job
Have Mentors For New Employees
When a new employee comes onboard pair them with a long-time employee who can show them how things are done, act as a sounding board for advice, keep them engaged and help them get acclimated to their new work setting.
Have An Open-door Policy
One employee retention strategy that should be implemented is an open-door policy where employees can always feel comfortable discussing workplace issues.
Management should always keep an open mind when listening to employees’ concerns and wants. Closed-minded management teams lead to increased employee turnover and a lack of retention.
Employee engagement is vital to a companies success.
Understand Why Employees Stay
Reaching out to your current employees for insight on why they stay the company is a valuable resource for identifying current policies that are working for the company and can help you piggyback new ideas off some of your current effective