As well as making sure that your company is hitting its sales targets and getting more customers, it is absolutely crucial to create a strategy to engage your company’s greatest asset - your team.
With unemployment currently low and more employees saying that they are open to leaving their current jobs, focus on employee retention is imperative for business owners and leaders.
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One of the top reasons why businesses need to improve employee retention is because employee turnover is expensive. Employee turnover means lost profits for productivity, training, recruitment costs and more.
According to The Telegraph, staff turnover in the UK amounts to nearly £4.13 bn annually, as new employees take at least 8 months to reach optimum productivity levels. For larger organisations with a high turnover rate, this can quickly add up.
So how do you retain your employees?
There are 6 key elements which you must have in place in order to be confident of good employee retention rates are as follows.
Burned out employees are more likely to find excuses to leave.
However, by cultivating a work environment that promotes a work-life balance, you create engaged, happy employees with higher morale and loyalty who are less likely to leave, even if their pay is low, since they enjoy their work and have a healthy work environment. Now that most organisations are no longer completely office-based, encouraging employees to set their own daily hours and using flexi-time to their advantage makes promoting a work-life balance easier than ever before.
MyTime helps your organisation move from a traditional office-based 9-5 type work model to a hybrid or multiple-place-of-work model with flexible hours.
Organisations who offer competitive pay and benefits as well as promotions give their employees financial security. The cost of this is offset by lowering their staff turnover costs.
If an employee is unable to meet their financial obligations, it is only natural for them to question their jobs. This is a simple if-then statement— “If I’m not earning enough to sustain my family or myself, then I will need to look for a new job.”
According to The Guardian, 7 out of 10 UK workers are “chronically broke” and stressed out about their finances. And the younger workers are the more likely they are to be worried - the biggest cause of stress for UK millennials is money.
Organisations with a good company culture have higher employee engagement rates and are more likely to retain valuable employees. A good culture makes use of long-term employees who demonstrate ideal behaviours and can also set a positive tone to attracting more potential talents.
A good company culture also creates great teamwork and promotes positive competition, which ensures that no problems or issues arise with co-workers which causes anyone to feel insecure and consider leaving the company.
Company culture comes from the top down, so a positive culture which promotes a healthy work-life balance must come from those in charge. If Directors and Managers take advantage of flexible working hours and prioritise a good work-life balance then employees will too.
One of the main causes of employee turnover, that is usually overlooked, is allowing your employees to stagnate in their current role.
A study conducted by Harvard Business Review and Glassdoor revealed that employees who stay longer in the same job without any title change are more likely to leave and find another company to step up in their career.
Staying in the same role for years raises the odds of the employee leaving the company for a better role by at least 1 percent. However, if an organisation offer clear paths for the employee to move up over time, employers can help boost their engagement and career opportunities and limit a harmful stagnation.
The main reason why leaders make sure that their employees are engaged is to increase their satisfaction and commitment to the organisation.
When employers engage in practices that support a good working relationship, employee satisfaction also increases. Since workers appreciate that the company is finding their talent and skills useful and appreciates their effort and service. This in turn, results in a higher level of employee retention.
When leaders create and build a positive relationship with their employees, offering help and guidance, employees feel more valued. Feeling valued and appreciated at work could be the most difficult thing for a company to measure, however, it is also the most important factor in increasing engagement.
Two-fifths or 39 percent of UK employees feel that they are not valued by their employer, which lowers their commitment to the organisation. They are less productive and question their reason for being in the company.
However, highly committed employees, on the other hand, feel valued and empowered by their employers, giving them no reason to leave their company.
Of course it is much easier to say what should be put in place to ensure great employee retention rates, than to actually do it. Delivering on the 6 key elements listed above is not easy and no one approach or toolset will deliver them. However, Triaster offers a platforms which really helps.
MyTime, doesn't just help with basic time and absence management, but it can also help significantly improve employees work-life balance by enabling the practical implementation of flexi-time policies, ensuring your employees don't want to leave.
How to Keep Employees Engaged and Happy without a Lavish Budget
How to Boost Productivity Painlessly [with MyTime]
This is an updated and refreshed edition of an article originally written in 2019.