Having a high employee retention rate means that the employees who work within your company remain working in your company for a long period of time.
Having a high retention rate is incredibly valuable for your company as constantly chopping and changing your employees will be time consuming, costly and damaging to the companies productivity.
Every time an employee leaves your company you have to invest heaps of valuable time into recruiting and training your new hires.
You will also have to spend large amounts of money on funding this recruitment or new people and of course on training these hires.
The constant chopping and changing of employees will greatly disrupts the consistency and workflow of the company, decreasing your effectiveness and productivity.
Having a high retention rate is incredibly valuable for your company as constantly chopping and changing your employees will be time consuming, costly and damaging to the companies productivity.
Here are the top 3 ways in which you can ensure your company will have a high retention rate:
1. Salary & Benefits Must Be Competitive
Whether your business is large or small, it is important to offer a competitive salary and a comprehensive benefits package to retain and attract employees.
To offer a 'good' salary, you must ensure that what you're paying your employees covers all the hours they work (including overtime hours), that the pay is fair throughout the company, and most importantly that what you're paying your employees is competitive with other companies are paying your employees.
The best way to make sure that your salary is accurate you must ensure that all employees get paid for every single hour that they work, or that there is some other benefit to working extended hours, such as a day is LEU.
You should ensure that every employee in the whole company is paid relative and accurately in comparison to their role and responsibilities.
Finally, to ensure that your salary is competitive, you should be researching what other similar companies of a similar set up, size or geographic area are paying their employees for similar roles and responsibilities; try and beat this pay, but if you can't beat them, do definitely join them.
If you're not already, you should also consider offering benefit packages to every one of your employees.
There is almost an endless list of potential benefits packages that you can offer your employees.
When offering these benefits packages you can offer a standard 'one size fits all' package, or a bespoke benefits packages that is tailored to every employees unique and individual needs.
Standard packages are packages that offer every employee the same benefits.
Some of these packages can be as simple as offering every employee a gym membership, a work phone, travel costs covered and/or a package car and insurance deal.
Some companies offer every employee a beneficial savings packages, so that for every X amount of money an employee saves, the employer contributes a percentage to it.
You get the idea, whatever you offer one employee, you must offer exactly the same to every other employee.
However, with workforces becoming more diverse, multi-generational and geographically dispersed than ever before, it is important to realise that a 'one size fits all' standard package may not work for everyone.
Infant, offering the same package to everyone may actually be costing you money as you are paying for things for employees that they do not want, nor need.
Instead of offering standard packages, you can offer bespoke packages that are tailored to every employees needs, desires and wants. For example:
- If your employees are graphically dispersed you should offer specific days in which they can work from home, offer discounted travel or enable car ownership. Similarly, if some employees live further away than other employees, offer these employees set days or afternoons in which they can work from home or cover their travel costs.
- Offer financial help to employees who need it. For instance, some bigger companies offer employees who have worked with them for over a year the opportunity to take out a loan through the company for a deposit on a house. Others have deals with banks to allow their employees to have better mortgage rates that they wouldn't have been able to access until they were earning more money.
- Observe cultural needs by allowing employees from cultured backgrounds or ethnic minorities to take special holidays to celebrate their religious beliefs. You could also offer fully paid english speaking classes for employees who do not speak fluent english, or want to better their knowledge of the english language.
- For smaller business, where money isn't as in abundance for advanced bespoke benefits packages, you could offer similar packages on a smaller scale. For instance, offering health conscious employees a fully paid gym membership and others, who are parents, discounted child care.
2. Hire The Right Person At The Start
Hiring the right people from the get go will ensure that they won't want to leave your company any time in the near future as they will feel that they are suited for the job and that they have the skills for the job, and they will have a good cultural fit with the company, and the other employees, meaning they will settle in well and feel more satisfied.
To ensure that you are hiring the right people from the start:
- Use the right interview questions and interviewing techniques for each role and each employee. Ensure that these interview questions are unique and tailored specifically to your organisation and what you need to vet new hires appropriately.
- Understand and define the culture of your company, and promote it in interviews. Ask questions that determine how potential employees fit into the companies cultures and how their career aspirations fit into the companies long term goals.
- Use different types of assessments to gather observable data on how an employee will fit into the company and the role. Use personality assessments to see whether a candidate has the right personality type for the pressures and responsibilities of the role. Use skills testing to ensure that the candidate has the skills to effectively and productively carry out their tasks. Finally, use cognitive testing to ensure that the candidate has the cognitive ability required for the potential role.
3. Invest In Your Employees Professional Development
Within your organisation, you should provide your employees with plenty of opportunities to further their learning and professional development.
A study found that millennials ranked learning and development the number one benefit an employer can offer.
It does make sense - if your business has lots of room for development, opportunity and expansion, then employees will be able to reach their full potential within the business and therefore will not feel the desire to leave and progress elsewhere.
There are two good ways to ensure your employees are developing correctly, here they are:
- Offer training programmes to all employees, old or new. This will allow them to develop more skills that they can use within your company for the years to come. These new found skills will make the employees feel more useful and allow them to be more productive; so more beneficial for both you and them.
- You should always promote from within the organisation where possible. This means you can save money on recruitment and promote trusty employees that have already shown good work ethic, reliability and honesty. It will also reduce retention rates as employees will stay in the company for longer as they will work in higher positions.
Before offering professional development, let your team know the value of improving themselves professionally and make the pro's of investing in themselves very clear.
It may also be worth asking your employees what sort of skills they'd like to accomplish and what they'd like to learn that will develop them professionally.
Bonus Strategy!
According to our favourite study done over the course of 2 years at Google, the most effective teams are the ones with the highest degree of psychological safety within them.
To boost psychological safety within a team you need to increase trust. To do that, I recommend you read our article on building trust within teams.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed learning about these 3 surprisingly simple ways to boost employee retention within your team.
If you have more ideas and thoughts on this I'd love to hear about them in the comments below.
