Every company wants to retain its employees. No matter what size your business is or what you sell, having employees frequently leave has negative financial, company culture, and performance repercussions.
Many companies delegate their concerns about employee retention to management or the HR department. After all, employees are less likely to stay if they are frustrated with their manager or feel undervalued.
Ultimately, though, these professionals aren’t the only ones at your organization who are responsible for retaining employees.
You are, too.
Who Has an Impact On Employee Retention?
Everyone in the organization has an impact on employee retention. The managers who coach other employees, the coworkers who collaborate on projects and hang around for water cooler chat, and even the customers your employees interact with can all have a part to play in your employees’ experiences.
You can’t successfully retain employees if they feel unsupported by your company culture. And at the end of the day, everyone contributes to that culture — even if they don’t realize it.
How to Build a Culture That Encourages Employees to Stay
Building a culture that encourages employee retention and decreases turnover is not a simple process. There’s no single way to do it, and not every strategy will work for every organization.
All the same, there are a few consistently effective ways to encourage employee engagement:
A stay interview is designed to help you find out why employees choose to stay at your company. Knowing what employees like about your organization can inform your recruiting practices and keep you from making changes that would result in higher turnover, like getting rid of a popular employee benefit.
- Offer a more competitive compensation package.
Employees have to pay their bills, and top-notch talent tends to expect excellent wages and benefits in return for their efforts. If you cannot pay higher wages, consider adding other valuable benefits such as schedule flexibility or additional vacation time.
- Create a mentorship or buddy program.
Sometimes employees want to talk to someone who is not a member of management or HR. By encouraging employees to form bonds with each other, you can help them ride out the more difficult times at your company.
- Empower employees to solve customer problems.
When customers are angry about a company policy, quality issue, or mistake, employees tend to get the brunt of that anger. After a while, some employees are likely to decide they’re not willing to put up with that anger and leave to work somewhere else.
By teaching employees how to deal with common issues, you can reduce much of the unpleasantness in customer-employee interactions — boosting loyalty among both customers and employees.
- Make your hiring process more selective.
You can do this by coming up with better ways to test job applicants or by partnering with a staffing agency that focuses on finding high-quality candidates.
- Offer skills enhancement training to long-term employees.
New technology, selling techniques, and laws can all have an effect on employees’ jobs. By offering ongoing training to your long-term employees, you can both prepare them for a continually changing workplace and show them they are valued in your organization.
- Recognize employee accomplishments.
This is often one of the simplest ideas to implement, but it’s incredibly important. Whether you give them a simple thank you, write handwritten well-done notes, or award them a bonus, a little praise can go a long way toward making employees want to stay.
Looking for Help With Hiring and Retention?
LG Resources is a highly-rated staffing agency with offices in Utah, the Kansas City area, and now Pennsylvania. If you are looking for assistance with finding, engaging, and retaining quality employees, reach out to us today.
