For many years, employees generally stayed with the same company for most or all of their working years. Today, however, employees may transition into a new workplace every few years. Some of the many reasons for this are because of lack of employee engagement in the workplace, the feeling of stagnation in their career path and a desire to earn more money. When your business spends a considerable amount of time and resources hiring and training the right individual, you can experience significant loss when that person leaves. If your company has a high turnover rate, there are a few steps that you could take to improve the situation.
Offer a Competitive Benefits Package
At the most basic level, employees generally spend their time working for a company in order to earn a living, maintain a desired quality of life and provide for their loved ones. In addition to paying your team members a competitive wage, the benefits package should be robust. One of the most important benefits that today’s workers pay attention to is health insurance. Additional benefits include paid time off, flex time, life insurance and employer contributions to a retirement plan. Even if your employees enjoy working for you, they may be enticed to look elsewhere if compensation is not competitive.
Create a Positive Work Environment
While a great salary and compensation package may help you to attract top talent and may keep some people working in a job that they dislike for longer than they otherwise would, the reality is that a negative work environment will eventually take a toll. Your workplace should foster productivity, and it also should be a place where your employees enjoy spending their days. Workplace culture, management styles and other factors feed into this.
Conduct Performance Reviews Regularly
If you do not regularly complete performance reviews, you may want to change this practice. Performance reviews are the time to tell your employees what they are doing right and how thankful you are for their efforts. They also give you time to provide constructive feedback and even to tell them what steps they should take to reach the next level in your company. Your employees need to have goals to aim for in order to feel as though they are professionally progressing.
Encourage Feedback
Communication in a healthy workplace involves an exchange between employees and management regularly. There may be several annoying issues in the workplace that you are not aware of. These may be easy fixes, and they could reduce a significant amount of stress. On the other hand, there may be major issues that are causing extreme discontentment and that are currently falling under your radar. Create an open-door policy so that your team members feel comfortable approaching you about issues. In addition, set up an anonymous feedback system so that your employees may feel freer to come to you with problems.
Empower Employees
Your employees may feel daily stress when they have responsibilities that they are not empowered to handle on their own. Once they are trained to complete a task, you should give them the freedom to work independently or within their designated teams. Micromanagement and the need to constantly obtain authorization can be cumbersome and unnecessarily stressful.
Show Sincere Interest
Your employees want to know that they are valued and recognized. In addition to completing regular reviews with constructive feedback, make an effort to show interest in them personally. This may be something as simple as asking about their vacation or remembering their spouse’s and children’s names. Excessive personal chatter and getting too involved should be avoided, but a quick check-in with each person from time to time can bolster morale.
Improving employee retention can result in financial savings, high levels of productivity, superior customer service and other essential benefits. The best time to turn your attention to these factors is before turnover becomes problematic. Now is the perfect time to review your procedures and work environment and to determine how these tips can be applied to your workplace.
