Struggling with Employee Retention?
Employees all over the world have various opinions about their jobs. Some love their job, some hate their job, some find it boring. In this blog, you will learn a few methods on how to keep your employees happy in the workplace which will lead to a great employee retention rate at your company.
Work-Life Balance
Keeping a healthy work and life balance is one of the keys to success. Employees that are constantly overworked will burn out quickly. Being under constant stress will lead to demoralization and eventually burnout and negative feelings. To avoid this, we want to make sure employees have a healthy work and life balance. Whether that means having a discount on membership for a local gym or a yoga class, finding balance is key. Employee’s time outside of the workplace should be respected.
Career Path
Having meetings with your employees to check in on their progress towards their career path is important. Employees are more likely to stay if they can see a linear progression in your company. If an employee does not see any possibility or opportunity to move up in the company ladder, they may leave for another company. Therefore, is important to have meetings about career paths within your company with employees. You can help employees with their career paths by providing training to enhance their skills or to increase their current skills. In addition to showing interest in your employee’s development, with training, you can create a more efficient environment.
Reward Top Performers
Incentives can be a great way to keep employees happy. It can help motivate employees to strive to be better and to reach your company’s goals. Reward your top performers with extra benefits such as incremental benefits. An example of an incremental benefit could be extra vacation days. As they are your company’s top performers, you can be assured that any time lost to vacation will be made up in their sales. This tactic is one of many to ensure employee retention from your top performers.
Give Personal Awards
Giving an employee a pin for ten years of service is quite boring. People are not likely to remember these super small tokens of appreciation. Instead, the employee something that he or she would like. Hosting a celebration event can boost morale and general happiness in the company. An example of this would be to take a team out to a football game. Millennials now enjoy experiences instead of awards over cash. An unforgettable outing with employees can drive company loyalty and motivate employees to produce their best work every day.
Transparency
Having transparency with the company can make employees feel more comfortable. Knowing what is happening in the company makes employees feel included and a part of the company. When a company acknowledges where they may have gone right or wrong for the year, the most important part is what they are doing to do to improve. With transparency, employees know they have to improve on in general to achieve company goals. Also providing feedback to employees and where they can personally improve can help employees be motivated to improve themselves. Be careful to not only give criticism, but constructive criticism. Giving just criticism can lead to a bad corporate culture and demoralize employees and can eventually lead to the employee leaving the company. This is something that many employees value and is main area of focus for any business trying to improve employee retention.
Flexibility in the Workplace
Everyone loves choice. Why not give it to them? Give your employee workplace flexibility. Sometimes, an employee may have a situation come up where they cannot be at work physically. Having the choice of working from home or telecommunicating may be something very important to employees. People have outside obligations and sometimes, those obligations get in the way to showing up to the office everyday at the exact time.
Personal Days
Having a day off to work on what the employee is passionate about can be a great benefit. Having a day to explore your interests and hobbies can generate more happiness for employees. An example of why people may take a day off is to volunteer at a food shelter near their come, or to take an online course to further their skills. Personal days might a time where employees can reset and come back into the job feeling refreshed and ready to work.
Set Guidelines
When employees come into a workplace for the first time, having a set of expectations and guidelines they can follow can contribute greatly to employee happiness. A common way to do this is to have amazing on-boarding documents that all new hires can read to get themselves familiarized with the company.
Offer Responsibility
Some people want to take on more responsibility. By offering responsibility to some employees, they can choose whether or not to take on more. If you assign responsibility, the employee may not be ready or may not want to have responsibility. This friendly competition of responsibility can create a more productive environment. When these employees step up, you can see how they interact with others and how well they work either as a leader or as a follower. Offering responsibility can come in many ways, one is offering employees to be part of a recruiting panel.
Mentorship Program
Having a mentorship program can help teach junior members of your business, as well as be the bridge between employees. A mentorship program will break barriers down among your staff. If your membership program pairs cross-functional members of your staff, everyone who is in the program will have a more holistic view of your company and me more informed about the workings of another side of the company they may not be involved in.
Saying Thank You
Saying thank you to employees who have been doing an amazing job can go a long way. Whether the employee solved a problem that has been plaguing the company for years or invented some new way to make work easier, a simple thank you email can really brighten an employee’s day. Using when to say thank you can also build your company culture. Saying thank you to an employee in a public setting can indicate that a certain type of behavior or action is valued. This can help drive motivation and company culture to make the work a more enjoyable place.
Conclusions About Employee Retention
Treating your employees nicely and respecting them can go a long way to keeping your top performers inside your company. We hope you can implement a few of these methods and strategies into your business and increase your employee’s happiness to make your business a wonderful place to work at.
