You may be the heart and soul of your business but your employees are the blood and life force! If you’re having trouble retaining good employees (which is actually one of the biggest issues that most businesses face), it’s time to think about how you can keep your top-performers happy. Here are 14 ways to reduce employee turnover.
1. Study your employee turnover – why have employees left in the past year or two? Focus particularly on your key employees, the ones who cost you the most when they left. Is there anything you can do differently or improve on to prevent this in the future? Always perform exit interviews to give you some insight into this.
2. Get serious with your recruitment – hiring the wrong people is the biggest cause of high turnover. Most business owners recruit based on skills and qualifications only but recruitment should be much more than that. You should hire people based on their behavioural and cultural fit as well.
3. Improve your onboarding – the first few weeks and months are crucial to retaining good talent. Over the first 90 days, focus on how you can improve this experience and create a solid process. Consider giving a welcome pack with essential information and implement a mentor system so that an experienced employee can support them and help them learn the ropes.
4. Offer competitive salaries and total compensation – pay and benefits are among the top reasons that people take jobs and show up for work every day. It’s a serious motivator so you need to be offering appropriate salaries and benefits as a minimum.
5. Offer flexible schedules and telecommuting options – flexibility has become a lot more important since the pandemic as we are all looking to improve our work-life balance. See if you can offer working remotely for some of the week or permanently as well as flexible hours.
6. Closely monitor toxic employees – if you have any employees that are overly critical, who gossip or blame others, and who are not team players, keep an eye on them. These types of employees can push other high achievers out of your business so try to address any problems before it’s too late.
7. Promote work-life balance – prevent burnout and increase satisfaction by encouraging work-life balance. You can do this through flexible scheduling, remote working, giving employees time off when they need it the most, and leading by example yourself.
8. Reward and recognise achievements – positive reinforcement is powerful so encourage and recognise excellence. When employees do something right or exhibit behaviours that you want to nurture, show your appreciation.
9. Pay attention to employee engagement – you can improve retention by identifying when an employee is disengaging and making efforts to help them get out of this funk. Think about how you can meet the social and emotional needs of your employees. Discuss this with them.
10. Improve communication and offer regular feedback – communication and collaboration are essential to make sure that the whole team is happy and productive. As well as using practice management systems, consider having regular 1:2:1s and performance reviews to give feedback and set individual goals. Infrequent performance reviews is actually a big reason that employees leave as they don’t feel inspired or motivated to improve.
11. Actively help each member develop – people get bored and they are all looking for opportunities to progress so help them do this. Show them the career path and give them the development opportunities and training they need to move up the ladder. It will do wonders for their sense of direction and purpose and will make them feel valued and committed to your business.
12. Be a great place to work – focus on improving the culture in your business and your staff will be engaged, happy, and loyal. Ask employees what they like about your business and what can be improved. It also helps if you have a shared vision and values to connect everyone together.
13. Invest in team-building and psychological safety – your staff need to feel connected and safe to voice their opinions without fear of being reprimanded. If you invest time to create this environment, you’ll find that your team are more cohesive, effective, and they are much more likely to take initiative and challenge how things are normally done.
14. Always be transparent – better communication with employees is key to increasing loyalty and therefore retention. Focus on updating the whole team with the business strategy and performance regularly – this gets the team invested in its success and boosts engagement and productivity.
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