Key Ways to Reduce Your Employee Turnover Rate
Tiffany Rowe, Marketing Administrator at Seek Visisbility explores how organizations can reduce employee turnover rates through better reward and recognition prgrams, effective communication, flexibility and establishing a culture of engagement
When it comes to managing a workforce, it’s always important to know how to best advertise roles, shortlist candidates, conduct interviews, and provide benefits that will entice the top workers to a team. However, if you really want to build the most productive workforce possible, it’s crucial to also continually work on reducing your firm’s employee turnover rate.
If staff members keep moving on after just a short period, not only will you have to spend more time and money on finding and training replacements, but the company’s team morale and productivity (Click here to read about The Single Most Overlooked Productivity Decision You Can Make) rates will also be negatively affected. Read on for some key ways you can go about reducing your firm’s employee turnover rate this year.
Recognize and Reward Staff Members
For starters, one of the most important ways to ensure your staff members stay with your company for longer is to recognize and reward their efforts and results. This doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money but can make a huge difference to employee satisfaction and engagement.
For example, start by simply thanking your workers for a job well done, and/or for going the extra mile in their roles. A heartfelt, sincere thank you, either in person, on the phone, via a letter or email message etc. can show people you notice their hard work, and appreciate it. Don’t be afraid to show your gratitude publicly too, via shout-outs on social media sites, in company newsletters, or at conferences and other events.
It also pays to purchase employee recognition gifts and to provide teams with perks. Gifts can include things like vouchers, movie tickets, bottles of wine, hampers, flowers, chocolates, or anything else you think will specifically suit the person and their interests, hobbies and home/family life.
As for perks, consider things such as free or better parking, free meals, zero or low-cost massages, and other healthcare benefits, access to on-site gyms, childcare, and quiet rooms, and additional time off work. You might also want to hand out awards through a regular set up, such as an Employee of the Month program, when you think it’s called for.
Help Workers to Learn and Grow
Next, keep in mind that something that’s incredibly important to employees these days, particularly the younger generations, is having the chance to learn and grow within their jobs. People are keen to receive regular training; to have development opportunities such as attending key industry events or taking on more responsibility at work, and to parlay this additional experience and knowledge into more regular promotions.
To reduce your employee turnover rate then, look for ways to assist your team to develop. You might hire speakers to come in and run learning-based sessions; create company-specific training, or invest in your workers by paying (fully or partly) for them to attend university or other courses. You could also set up mentoring programs; hire from within rather than externally; and enable staff members to take on new challenges in their jobs.
You should also regularly ask your employees what their career goals are. Running quarterly, or at a minimum annual, reviews, where you can sit down and discuss these things, are ideal. Once you know what your workers want to achieve, you can create plans, together, to help them get there and learn and grow as time goes on.
Give People More Flexibility
Giving your teams more flexibility can also really help to encourage them to stay on board for longer. This can be done in numerous ways. For example, consider not just making it possible, but actually encouraging, workers to move around the company. Enable them to try different roles and to work in different locations, including other offices around the state, country, or even world.
Flexibility can also be given when it comes to working hours and methods. For example, make it possible for interested staff members to work from home more often; to decide on their own working hours, based on their family life, most productive times, and more; and give people access to tech tools which enables flexibility in how, when, or where tasks are completed.
You can also make it easy for employees from different areas of the business to work together on projects, rather than always limiting conversations to set teams. This gives staff members the opportunity to not only enjoy getting to know other employees but also means they’ll get access to fresh points of views and information, which keeps things interesting. As a bonus, this makes innovation more likely for your company too.
