Employee turnover is expensive for any business. While there is much discussion about the ‘Great Resignation’, the reality is more about the big reshuffle. Rather than staff quitting and stepping away from the workplace altogether, large swaths of employees are looking to move around the job market, which includes a change in industry sector, retraining and fine-tuning a better work-life balance.
Either way, staff are leaving and businesses need strategies to make them stay. After all, you want to hold onto your best talent. It would be nice to be able to increase salaries and benefits, but that’s not always a practical or sustainable solution. Dip into our proven ‘don’t go’ retention strategies.
Employee onboarding
You only get one chance to make a good impression. Once you’ve found the right candidate, you want to onboard them as fast and efficiently as possible. Losing a new employee, potentially points to poor and inefficient onboarding.
The key to successful onboarding is a clearly mapped out process. HR teams need to lean on technology to achieve this and find a robust balance that combines automation, self-drive by the new employee and genuine interaction with other staff. Making it easy for candidates to sign their contract, view their personal details, view company information all via their mobile device, empowers new starters and helps to transition them as an employee, where they will have access to much more such as their rota etc. The buddy approach works very well for many organisations.
Try to capture a new employee’s excitement about starting their new job, whilst minimising frustration and friction throughout the onboarding process.
Flexible working
Successful employee retention relies on a combination of factors, including flexible work arrangements. For some businesses, industry sectors and roles, creating flexible working that’s good for the employee and good for the business can be very challenging. Leaders in HR are adopting more technology to develop employee experience as part of their retention strategies. Leveraging technology to allow staff to check rotas, swap shifts, check who they will be working with. Many businesses have been able to adopt some form of hybrid working, allowing staff work from home some days, arrive early, leave early all add up to delivering a better balance of home and work life, which makes for happier employees.
Personal development opportunities
Employees want career paths alongside development opportunities. Employees are looking for jobs with better and stronger career trajectories, according to research by McKinsey. Smart companies are looking at smart ways to promote staff, but also create a personalised learning pathway for their people. Technology can deliver a combined self-drive learning, with learning at the point of need with other structure learning and education from within the organisation or externally.
Personalised experience
We’re human, which makes us all different, so delivering a personalised experience for staff may seem totally unobtainable. Organisations are driven to create an employee experience that will improve employee performance, retention and efficiency.
Personalisation focusses on the individual employee. Using technology can connect staff, in ways that can be tailored to the individual and by the individual. It’s part of the solution that continues to connect staff, provide immediacy, connection and social interaction that creates that sense of belonging.
Of course, there is a caveat, as many businesses don’t want to switch off aspects of internal communications. However creating a more authentic feel, where staff have preferences works amazingly well.
Give your people Kudos – make sure they know they are appreciated
Employees want career paths, but they also desire recognition. By not recognising hard work, going the extra mile and appreciating your people, they will feel undervalued. Research suggests that you can lower your staff turnover rate by 31% by implementing a recognition strategy.
Staff love real-time appreciation and recognition, being called out to their colleagues and peers. Technology can provide that immediacy, allowing them to interact and applaud when they wish. Use of tools like ‘Kudos’ where colleagues can give kudos to their peers as well as karma is a more natural and organic way connecting, and interacting. It’s genuine when its driven by the staff and not seen as a management initiative. Although how this is done needs to be well thought through and managed to avoid the ‘best buddies only giving kudos to their internal besties’.
Peer-to-peer recognition can be easily implemented via cloud-based SaaS tools such as elementsuite. You can take full advantage of available communication channels where everyone is present and encourage your employees to give shout-outs to their teammates whenever they unlock a new achievement. Make it fun, inclusive across all your staff, whatever their role, including remote and hard to reach members of the workforce.
Boost happiness and increase retention
Engaged and happy employees are 60% more likely to stay. Focussing on employee retention strategies in a highly competitive job market is a business imperative for most HR leaders. A robust retention strategy includes
- Competitive salary and benefits
- Hiring the right people in the first place – make sure they are a good fit
- Employee recognition
- Smooth onboarding
- Career pathway opportunities
- Health and wellness
- Employer culture
Digital tools and automation may feel counter intuitive. However they are delivering the much needed bridge that supports a robust employee retention strategy for human resources teams.
