Employee Retention Strategies

Employee retention is an important part of building a successful business. Every time you lose an employee, you lose out on their production for as long as the job remains vacant and invest countless hours trying to find a suitable replacement and training them to do the job adequately. In today’s rough economy, developing a successful employee retention strategy is crucial.

While each company is different, you should always have a strategy in place that maximizes your ability to retain your best employees. You’ll learn what works best in your company over time, but you should always create a strategy to improve employee retention.

Evidence-Based Practices Employee satisfaction research – particularly employee exit surveys – needs to play a key role in your retention strategies. You cannot and will not be able to successfully retain employees without knowing how or why these employees are leaving and/or unsatisfied. Most companies avoid surveying dissatisfied employees because they expect the results to be biased against the company.

But in many cases your company did something that caused the employee to be dissatisfied, and you need to learn from that no matter how you feel about the employee. Organizational Commitment Your entire organization from top to bottom needs to be committed to your retention strategy as well. This includes managers and executives, with the understanding that no one employed by the company no matter how important their role may be is beyond reprimanding if they fail to adhere to employee retention guidelines.

From the mail room to the CEO, you need to make sure that everyone understands that if they aren’t working towards employee retention, they are not doing their job. Perfect Employee Performance Evaluation Traditional methods of performance evaluation are poor. Most people try to trust their eyes when it comes to how well an employee completes their work, but with an increasingly digital world, your eyes may not show you what the employee has done, did, or will do.

All your eyes show you is what it appears the employee is doing at the moment. Employee performance evaluation needs to improve, because improper punishment/praise for the way the employee works is simply inadequate, and can easily cause good employees to become frustrated with their jobs. Set Rewards, Milestones, and Goals in Place In addition to correct performance evaluations, it’s also important that you learn the correct way to reward employees for all of their hard work.

All employees want to feel appreciated, so whether it is a raise, or a gift, or praise-worthy performance evaluations that don’t make critical statements without a good reason – anything you can do to show appreciation for what your employees accomplished will be highly valued. Constant Employee Input Taking the time to get your employee’s opinions of the workplace can also go a long way, including finding out what they believe they can use in the office to make it a more enjoyable place, and how current processes can be removed or improved upon.

For example, you may find that employees are hoping for a way to exercise in the downtime, so setting up a treadmill or elliptical machine in the break room may be useful. Clear Organizational Charts Company organization also plays a key role in employee happiness. Make sure that your company is correctly organized.

Every employee should know who their direct supervisor is. The fewer bosses an employee has, the better, so that there is little confusion and only one person (or two, if necessary) that can tell the employee what to do. Security The employees also want to know that they’re working in a place that is going to stick around, especially in today’s economy.

So finding ways to keep them in the loop about company financing and being honest with the employees about short and long term strategies are all going to be helpful.

There are other avenues you can take as well. For example, an easy to understand punishment system for failing to meet a deadline can be important, as can researching employee loyalty and seeing what maintains the best employees.

But regardless of the methodologies, you need to set up all of this information into a formal strategy that is adopted by the entire organization from top to bottom. What’s more, you need to consistently try to receive employee feedback, including lost employees, to adjust it further based on what works and what doesn’t. Only then can you hope to have a strategy that will maintain the best employees in the organization.

You may also like to know some of the common myths associated with employee retention that you need to be wary of.