Employee Retention
Keeping your employees, especially retaining your top performers is critical for your business success. This is important today more than anytime in the past because of the following two main reasons:
- Strong competition in any market and industry requires high performance from companies in order to build and keep their competitive advantage. In addition, productivity, efficiency and know-how are critical for being competitive and they all depend on the quality of your employees.
- Service economy – every business is a service business, even the traditional commodity production industries compete on service today in order to differentiate themselves from their competition. The quality of service as well as reliability and relationships with the customers all depend on your employees.
In order to keep up with the two major challenges described above you must have a winning employee retention strategy and system in place. Some of your employees will leave your organization for variety of reasons no matter what you do however the majority of them can be influenced by your way of doing business especially by the way you treat and care about your employees.
It is a simple underlying foundation for creating relationships with your employees which is as you expect them to do certain things for you – they expect you to do certain things for them. It is an ongoing ‘give and take’ relationship which in long-term builds trust or disappointment on both sides.
10 tips to keep your employees longer
Here are 10 very simple and effective tips that can help you retain your top employees and build a successful organization:
1. Respect
Treat all of your employees with respect. Show respect and appreciation of their opinions, ideas and accomplishments. In return, they will respect you and your organization.
2. Belonging
Belonging is an important factor because every employee has a need to be part of the team. This is an emotional driver for every human being – to feel belonging both in business and personal life. Make sure each of your employees is accepted as a valuable team member.
3. Teamwork
Your organizational success depends on more than a few top performers. Structure your way of doing business to be driven by building a strong team based on collaboration, open door policies and support among team members. Build transparency and trust and your tem will perform at its full potential.
4. Skills
In every company employee skills are critical for achieving your goals and objectives. Define the ideal skills your workers should possess and identify any gaps. Build an ongoing plan based on your gap analysis and your business requirements on how the skills can be continuously improved.
5. Training
In order to keep everybody’s skills up-to-date and be able to face and take advantage of the new challenges in your marketplace you need an ongoing training for your people. Your training strategy and plan should be ongoing with incremental improvements. Instead of your employee training to be a once or twice in a year event, make training and employee development ongoing by focusing on step by step improvements.
6. Ongoing feedback
Performance appraisal in many organizations is an event (official once a year employee performance evaluation and feedback). Instead of viewing performance appraisal as an event you should build it as a process. This means that you should incorporate ongoing feedback which is more effective and efficient for your employees as well as for your company.
7. Recognition
Recognize your team achievements and individual performance on time. This is a powerful positive reinforcement for both individuals and teams and it encourages everyone to improve.
People who are recognized for their good work are happy employees and motivated to perform even better in the future.
8. Rewards
While recognition is an effective motivator, reward is a type of recognition when you specifically reward individuals or teams with monetary or non-monetary rewards. Example of monetary reward can be an annual bonus while non-monetary reward can be day off or work from home once a week.
Depending on your business make a list of monetary and non-monetary rewards and use them because they are effective and make a difference.
9. Flexibility
When dealing with employees you need to be flexible just like you need to be flexible when dealing with your customers. Every individual is different in some specific and unique ways and it is important for you as a manager to understand them as human being and know their needs.
10. Security
People in general feel secure when they know they have a good job and long-term employment. This is important for you to recognize because this is in line with your need of keeping your top employees longer working for your organization. Show your people that your company thinks and acts with long-term plans in addition to short-term business requirements.
Keeping employees is cost-effective because recruiting, hiring and training new employees costs money and requires long time. It is smarter for you to focus on building long-term relationships with your employees based on trust and long-term commitment and your employee retention plan will be successful.
Take into consideration these 10 tips and convert them into a retention plan and system. Identify what is important and critical for your business and use them on a continuous basis.