How to Retain Employees?

Retaining a motivated and an optimistic employee is vital to any organization's growth and success. There will be a negative effect on an organization’s morale, if employee turnover increases the expenses. Implementation of an employee retention program is an effective way in making the key workers remain employed while maintaining job productivity and performance.

For creating a strong workforce, hiring of employees is the starting phase of any organization. Next, you have to keep them retained. High employee turnover costs business owners in productivity and time.

Strategies to Retain Employees

Let us now understand the strategies applied by employers to retain good employees −

Exit Interviews − Conduct “stay” interviews, in addition to performing exit interviews to learn why employees are leaving; also consider asking longer-tenured employees why they stay.
Asking Questions − Ask questions duch as −
- Why did you come to work here?
- Why have you stayed?
- What would make you leave?
- What are your non-negotiable issues?
- What about your managers?
- What would you change or improve?
Then, use that information to strengthen your employee-retention strategies.
Competitive Benefits − Offer a competitive benefits package that fits your employees’ needs. Providing health insurance, life insurance and a retirementsavings plan is essential in retaining employees.
Rewards to Employees − Encourage healthy competition and incentives to help keep workers feel motivated and rewarded.
Expectations of Employees − Make sure employees know what you expect of them. It may seem basic, but often in small companies, employees have a wide range of responsibilities. If they are not aware of the responsibilities their jobs call for and what you need from them, they can’t perform up to the standard, and their morale may also take a dip.
Financial Rewards − Offer financial rewards or other financial awards for employees who meet performance goals and stay for a predetermined time period, say, three or five years. Also, provide meaningful annual appraisals on their pay.
Avoid Communication Gap − Create open communication between employees and management. Hold regular meetings in which employees can offer ideas and ask questions. Have an open-door policy that encourages employees to speak frankly with their managers without fear of repercussion.
Manager’s Involvement − Get managers involved and make them spend time with their employees and understand their knowledge requirements, helping good performers move to new positions and minimizing poor performance.
Business Communication − Communicate your business’s mission and the organization’s goals in a way that will keep the employees mentally and emotionally tied to your company.
Employee Promotion − Promote from within whenever possible and give employees a clear path of enhancement. Employees will become frustrated and may stop trying if they see no clear future for themselves in your company.
Deployment of Employee − Employee deployment is for creating a job rotation to employees, who have been working in the same department and same work for a longer amount of time. This deployment of employees to other departments and other works, will create change of work and helps employee to build relationships with other employees and enjoys different work with a challenge.
Hiring HR Professionals − Hire competent HR professionals in your company to oversee and streamline your employee structure and processes. Putting one person in charge of managing employee benefits, perks, reviews and related tasks takes a huge workload off you and also makes sure employees are treated fairly.

Other Ways to Improve Employee Retention

Let us now discuss a few other methods that will go a long way to help retain employees in an organization.

Ensure those being recruited have a realistic idea of what the job entails.
Improved career development opportunities.
Effective appraisals.
Strong diversity policies.
A practicable means of dealing with bullying.
A good work/life balance.
A mechanism for staff to register dissatisfaction, whether it be appraisals, grievance proceeding and so on.
Leadership training for managers.

Adopting a strategy for employee retention is not always easy, but it will greatly benefit your organization.

Previous Page Print Page