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How Organizations Can Improve Employee Retention

Some employee turnover is unavoidable, but beyond the cost of acquiring and training new employees, there’s also productivity cost for the time your company goes without someone doing the work at full efficiency. This combination of new talent acquisition costs and productivity costs add up in the long-term. So, how can organizations best attract and retain top talent over the long-term?

Establish a Great Workplace Environment

A great workplace environment helps improve job satisfaction, team collaboration and employee performance. Start by transforming how employees interact with the company. Help them feel more connected to what’s going on in the organization, especially with the company’s goals.

Employees should understand how they and their teams are getting the company closer to fulfilling goals. Open up the workplace to more conversations. In meetings, feedback sessions, and in every other context, show employees that their input and ideas are valuable.

Ideally, your working environment should encourage employees to be engaged. Celebrate personal and work milestones, foster positive interactions, and generally make the workplace a comfortable environment for everyone on the team.

Once you’ve started to cultivate a good workplace culture, emphasize it. When you’re onboarding new team members, be mindful of how they will fit into the team and the work environment.

Show Appreciation & Recognition

It’s important for employees to know they’re valued in the workplace. Appreciate great performance and recognize the accomplishments of individuals and teams regularly. Make appreciation and recognition a common thing, not a rare occurrence.

Recognition of outstanding performance doesn’t always have to be just words. Words are important, but bonuses, team rewards, and raises put some action behind the words. Recognize key accomplishments, reaching milestones, and performance improvements over time.

Prioritize Your Onboarding

Hiring employees who are a great fit is one thing, but you need to follow that up with an excellent onboarding process. You want to leave new hires feeling welcomed, valued, and prepared to do their jobs.

Create an onboarding plan that walks through what their orientation, training, and first days on the job will look like. This should be pre-planned and never thrown together at the last minute. There’s no need to set in stone a complex plan, but having a draft to work from makes the process feel more planned, fluid, and valuable to the new employee.

New hires should be greeted with well thought-out and useful onboarding. Anything less is not doing justice to your organization and can leave a bad impression on a new hire. Always put your best foot forward and showcase the organization in the best light possible during those first interactions.

Offer Employees Flexibility

A recent online study amongst 1,010 British Columbia adults by Miles HR revealed flexible working hours to be the most valued employee perk. Offering flexible hours provides talent the ability to adapt their job to their life, instead of the other way around. Family life, social life, and general quality of life can improve with flexible hours. As long as performance stays positive, flexible hours are a great tool for employee retention.

Provide Opportunity For Career Growth

People do not want to work the same job for years without any opportunities for advancement. There needs to be a clear path upwards, with career growth opportunities available. Many organizations incorporate programs for progression tailored to their employees.

Examples of growth opportunities include:

  • Online training opportunities
  • Paid educational sessions
  • Tuition assistance programs
  • Department level training sessions

Provide Adequate Resources

It’s easier to do a job well done when you’re equipped with the right tools. Aim to offer the best tools available in your industry so your employees can work smarter and become more efficient. When transitioning, shift over conservatively and make sure teams are fully integrated and comfortable with a specific system before you introduce another one.

If you opt to suddenly introduce a host of new platforms to your teams, productivity and efficiency can all go down and employees can get very frustrated. Implementing a tech or tool change gradually can be a better approach in most cases.

Retention is something you need to actively focus on to keep employee turnover low. You may not be able to avoid all situations, but any reduction in turnover represents acquisition and productivity costs savings for your business. The efforts do pay off in the long run, for productivity, and overall company performance.

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