We’ve never seen employee turnover this rampant.
Not only do 4 million employees nationwide quit their jobs every month, but one out of every 3 new employees leave their new positions after six months or less. This messes with productivity and culture while skyrocketing the cost of recruitment.
Maintaining high employee retention within your organization used to be a way to keep up with tight business competition, but nowadays it’s actually a way to get ahead. Beating turnover in the highest-turnover period in recent American history requires more than a passive attempt at sprucing up your workplace. It requires a full employee retention plan.
An employee retention plan is a step-by-step initiative to boost retention through a series of intentional changes and improvements to your company’s culture. According to a report by the Work Institute, 75% of reasons for turnover are fixable at the source. That means 75% of your recruitment woes, inconsistent talent and misaligned culture can be solved right away with a sound employee retention plan.
Here are the 6 steps you need to take to boost employee retention in your organization:
Benefits and Compensation
The first and most important step, as simple as it may be, is improving benefits and compensation for your staff. We know, we know, it’s expensive. However, it’s not only worth the effort, but it can actually bring you a return on your investment over a short time.
Better compensation makes your team happy, and happy workers are 13% more productive. Better compensation leads to easier and quicker hiring, which saves money on recruitment and allows you to choose more qualified talent. Better compensation leads to more positive word-of-mouth about your organization, which helps your reputation and leads to a more loyal customer base. Last but not least, of course, better compensation helps your team stay together amidst The Great Resignation.
The following workplace and culture improvements can all fall flat if your workforce is unsatisfied with its pay and benefits. That’s why Step 1 should always be addressing that elephant in the room head on to boost employee retention, happiness, and even profit.
Employee Retention Software
As the last three years have shown us, the office is no longer truly the office. Almost every workforce relies on remote team members that provide critical services despite never entering their physical workplace. Overall, the global shift to work-from-home has been a good thing, but an issue has arisen for the companies that employ remote staff: turnover.
Given the nature of the job and the lack of opportunity to get to know teammates, remote employees usually feel disconnected and disengaged from their organizations. The solution is giving them employee retention software that boosts employee engagement through an online social community.
Employee retention software provides a solution that your team members can use to streamline communication, motivate one another, earn recognition, get to know and connect with their colleagues, and much more. It helps connect your remote, hybrid, on-site and deskless employees in one online community for the sake of both performance and engagement boosts.
The trick is the use of personalized employee profiles, similar to a social media site. It’s fun to be able to sign in to a community of your peers and interact with them on a daily basis; that’s the formula that’s led to Facebook being one of the biggest work distractions of the 21st century. You can harness that exact distraction and turn it INTO work! It won’t be a software that your team’s forced to use – they’ll be happy to sign in to their own community and reach out to their peers.
If you want to learn more about employee retention software and what to look for when searching for one, we talk a lot more about the topic here! If you’re looking to boost employee retention and promote your culture, it’s one of the most important steps you should take..
Onboarding & Learning Management
An overlooked factor contributing to the retention crisis is the huge variance in companies’ prioritization of consistent education. We all know how sloppy onboarding programs can be if not planned carefully, but did you know that 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for 3 years if they feel that they received a great onboarding experience? How about the fact that 1 in 10 employees have left a company because of a poor onboarding experience?
We cover more about onboarding in our article here, and I’ll spoil a little bit of it – adopting a social workplace community is the biggest key to success.
While every company has some sort of onboarding process, not every company attempts to help workers learn more as they continue their careers with them. Education is a higher priority for the national workforce than you might think; 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in helping them learn.
Employee development is a key aspect of business success in both retention and ROI – it’s estimated that ineffective training costs businesses an average of $13.5 million annually per 1,000 employees, and over $1 million per 100.
That’s why learning management systems are so important to a company’s success. Not only do they increase employee knowledge and confidence with dynamic, customizable quizzes and videos, but they actually engage teams enough to keep them working at the same place. When your company excels at continued education, it becomes a talent destination for the top minds of any industry. Everyone wants to learn – make sure your onboarding process and LMS gets them there.
Employee Recognition & Rewards
Rewarding your team for a job well done can actually be an enormous game-changer for your staff’s satisfaction and your organization’s employee retention rate. If you don’t believe us, consider the facts that 75% of employees say receiving recognition makes them want to stay at their companies longer, and that Gallup revealed the #1 reason most people say they leave their jobs is because they feel they aren’t recognized or appreciated enough.
Changing a lack of recognition isn’t quite as simple as, well, recognition. It’s about motivating employees to put effort into their jobs with the knowledge that they’ll be appreciated for their work – and perhaps even rewarded with an extra prize from an incentive program.
Rewards programs are proven winners when it comes to beating turnover – studies have shown that incentive programs boost productivity by an average of 35% while simultaneously solidifying engagement and retention. Putting incentives ahead of your team keeps them focused and ready to commit to the company’s long-term.
Don’t forget, though, recognition doesn’t just come from management. If you can build a culture where your team members congratulate each other on accomplishments, you’ll have a community of appreciation that can completely defeat high turnover.
A Culture of Communication
Communication means too many different things to too many different people-leaders. Sometimes you’ll find that a company believes they’ve mastered communication because their workers enjoy chatting with management. Other companies believe scheduling meetings and sending out daily newsletters can substitute for holistic engagement. While these are great means of connection themselves, you cannot rely on them to keep your staff fully informed, connected with their management, or even working with their company.
Business communication is defined by the interaction between two people to reach a common goal, rather than one person speaking in the direction of another. Your employees should be welcome to speak back just as easily, especially if it helps them more thoroughly understand their role. That’s why meetings and emails themselves just won’t cut it; they’re too one sided and don’t provide the engagement employees need to feel satisfied and informed. Between relationship-building, task delegation, and information sharing, efficient communication has to be present in your employee retention plan.
As companies grow, the ties that bind colleagues can stretch and weaken with the size of their workforce, leading to disconnections between departments. Unless you’re a company large enough for a dedicated internal communications team, it’s likely to become HR’s responsibility to take charge.
Communicate news and events wherever your team spends the most time – and hey, that could be your employee retention software. The platform should have a dedicated area for bulletin news, whether that info is an upcoming event, sales win, or even a colleague’s birthday.
Communication becomes even more pivotal for hybrid and remote workforces, since it dictates how they operate, what they prioritize and how fast they get things done. Capitalize on digital tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and other messaging platforms while making sure everything’s centralized in one place to ensure your teams aren’t checking multiple inboxes.
Some HR systems are integrated with Slack and Microsoft Teams themselves, to truly close the loop on employee engagement.
Once you’ve established a culture of communication, you can further refine it with one more element to your employee retention strategy.
Welcome feedback
“I like to say that we have a “feedback on the fly” culture. The goal is that we’re always providing feedback as things happen. But we do have formal feedback sessions every 90 days. People crave feedback. Of course, everyone loves a pat on the back. But people really do want to know where they can improve as well, and taking the time for recognition and ongoing feedback is critical.”
That’s a quote from Refine Labs’ COO Megan Bowen on creating a talent destination through making time for feedback, which is one of the most underutilized employee retention strategies. Feedback is crucial in virtually every facet of professional life. If feedback within your workplace isn’t consistent and clear, it can cause misalignment, hurt productivity, and yes, increase turnover. According to Gallup, only 26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive from their manager helps their performance.
While feedback from management to employee can and should be mastered, let’s specifically look at feedback from employee to management: there’s a 16% decrease in employee retention rates for workers who aren’t comfortable giving upwards feedback.
Encourage employees to give you feedback during one-on-one meetings in order to respond to individual concerns and add a personal element to routine chats. To get a wider picture of your workplace’s culture, however, it’s an excellent idea to try out a survey tool that lets you ask your team any question you want in a number of different formats. And hey, a tool like that is available on some employee retention software!
That ability to give feedback itself, while important, isn’t the sole factor that can defeat turnover on its own. The content of what your workers are telling you is the next key. When honest, your team’s feedback can clue you into everything that needs fixing or reassessing within your workplace. Perhaps your employees have an issue with the flexibility of their positions & work-life balance, or they feel that your performance review method isn’t as helpful as it could be. Learning about the issues your team cares about is by far the best way to tackle them, and you won’t hear about them without curating a culture of feedback.
There are a lot of moves you can make to boost employee retention, but the first true step is trying HelloTeam.
HelloTeam is the only employee retention platform that’s designed to help you master performance management, employee engagement and establish a social workplace community for remote, on-site, and hybrid teams. We can help you modernize your HR processes and perfect the employee experience for both your deskless and online workers.
Our platform has features in place to help you enhance your feedback strategy, which engages your team and brings you crucial information you wouldn’t have otherwise had access to. You can use our customizable survey tool to solicit feedback from your staff, along with the ability to anonymize the results. We’ve also got a robust one-on-one/meeting utility that facilitates 360° feedback and dynamic communication.
HelloTeam’s employee recognition features let you engage your team and have fun doing it. Our rewards solution lets them redeem real gifts after meeting goals of your choice. The heart and soul of our platform, however, is the ability to give recognition to other team members with high fives and badges. Send a colleague a high five with a personalized message as a congratulations or piece of acknowledgement whenever you want – even from your phone! Similarly, supervisors can customize recognition badges that can be awarded to workers and featured on their profiles.
This can all be found on HelloTeam’s dashboard, which is what sets us apart and makes us a true employee experience. When workers can congratulate teammates, fill out surveys, redeem rewards, give feedback, update goals, and far more all on one screen, it opens the door to a much higher level of productivity, engagement, and profit.
We also made sure the HelloTeam dashboard is consistent for both team members that work from home and those that work on-site. Whether on your desktop or phone, you can schedule meetings, send high fives, and do everything else with any employee no matter where they operate from. We’re a social workplace community that simulates a professional environment that works for everyone.