Best Employee Retention Strategies

One of the biggest and most expensive headaches in any HR department is replacing employees who have left. Finding the new employee, onboarding them, and getting them into the workplace is not cheap, and more companies would much rather have high-quality employees that actually choose to stay at their job. While it might be impossible to retain all of your employees, there are some employee retention strategies that you can and should use to help ensure that your best remain a part of your team.

Better Exit Interviews

If you have people who are leaving your company, the exit interview is a good place to get an understanding of just why they are leaving. Get a sense of why people are leaving. Are they finding jobs where they can make more money for the same amount of work? Do they feel as if they are not being treated fairly? Do they feel as if there is no room for them to grow at the company? Is the atmosphere of the company unwelcoming to them?

When you collect data from all of the employees who are leaving, it can give you insight into the places where the company may be failing them. This can allow you and the HR team to find ways to alleviate those issues for current and future employees.

Understand the Pain Points of Employees

While exit interviews can be a huge benefit, it is important to keep in mind the employees who are still working at the company. By being more proactive, you can start to find the pain points, the areas that employees are having trouble with, early enough that something can be done about it. By offering employee surveys, you can glean a substantial amount of knowledge regarding what the employees think and what they want. By having anonymous surveys, it will allow them to be more open about criticisms that are legitimate and that may need to be addressed.

These surveys, and actually looking for ways to make meaningful changes for employees, shows them that you are being proactive. They will feel more comfortable working for a company that wants to provide everyone with the best possible experience.

Ensure the Managers Provide Positive Feedback

Managers are often tasked with giving employees negative feedback when those employees have done something incorrectly or when they are not meeting expectations. While this may be expected, managers often forget to provide positive feedback to their employees for the things that they are doing well. Simply acknowledging the good helps to provide more trust with the employees when the negative feedback is warranted. No one wants to work in an environment where the only thing they hear from their bosses is how they are doing things wrong. To truly engage your employees, manager feedback is going to be part of any ongoing employee retention strategies you employ.

Create Incentives for the Employees

You will find that adding additional incentives other than just earning a paycheck can make employees more engaged. When they are engaged and have incentives and rewards for being a part of the company, they are less likely to leave. These rewards, whether it is something like employee of the month, awards for the most sales, etc. provide the employees with an incentive to stay at the company and to work hard toward those rewards.

However, there should be other incentives and perks for working at the company, as well. These do not always need to be large monetary incentives either. By offering a discounted gym membership, movie tickets, bagels and doughnuts on Friday, and getting better coffee in the break room, it all helps to create a better and happier workspace. People are less likely to leave a place where they are happy.

Offer Opportunities for Learning, Development, and Growth

One of the big reasons that so many people end up leaving their current job is because they do not see any room in the job to learn and grow. They do not see a path for upward advancement, and they are not content staying in their current position the entire time they are at the workplace. Your employee retention strategies should definitely incorporate learning and development and professional development into the employee life cycle.

Career growth is important. This does not mean that everyone needs to get a promotion, as that is not feasible. However, you could still offer lateral promotions and training in other departments to help employees improve their skills and continue to learn.

Salary and Benefits

While money might not be the only factor that is used when a person decides whether they want to stay at a job or not, it is easily one of the most important. Financial stability is important for everyone, and so are benefits. Good health insurance will help to keep people in their job. They know how expensive it would be on their own, and they like knowing that they have healthcare when they need it.

Salary needs to be analyzed for your employees each year, and you will want to make sure that your salary stays competitive if you want to find and keep your employees. The same is true with benefits. Failure in either of these areas can often trigger an exodus of employees.

Hire the Right People from the Start

When you are looking for new employees, you want to hire the best employee from the start, naturally. However, you have to look at more than just their education and the highlights on their resume. If you hire someone who has a habit of only staying at jobs for a few months or a year or so, there is a good chance that you are just the next one on their list of places to work. Using quality software that can help with the hiring and onboarding process and conducting transparent interviews with the employees will help you bring in the right people.

HR departments who want to keep as many of their employees retained as possible will want to employ these types of strategies and best practices. They can help not only to improve the overall retention rate, but also the way that the employees feel about their company. Those who are happy and heard feel more loyalty to the company and their fellow employees. What are your employee retention strategies? Share in the comments below.