A third of all new employees quit after just six months on the job. Employee retention is a major issue for many companies, but not many businesses know how to encourage their workers to stick around.
Key Takeaways
- Implement an excellent and welcoming onboarding experience
- Take time to prioritize employee recognition
- Empower your team by offering plenty of learning opportunities
- Offer flexibility in your employee’s roles
The foundation of any company is the people that it consists of. And by prioritizing employee retention, you can ensure that your business keeps those top performers for years to come.
Keep reading, and we’ll share four of the best employee retention strategies to ensure your employees stay happy where they are!
See Related: 4 Ways A Company Event Can Prevent Burnout Among Employees
#1. Create A Captivating And Welcoming Onboarding Experience
No company is successful without the people that make it. The hardworking employees of any business are what keeps it afloat and profitable.
However, not all employees stick around at a company long-term. There are many reasons why employees may leave their jobs, but it’s important for employers to find ways to keep them around.
Employee retention is about more than just keeping your workers happy. It’s about creating a healthy and engaging environment so that top talent stays with you as long as possible.
What Is Employee Retention?
If you’re interested in finding ways to retain employees, you first need to understand what exactly employee retention is.
Employee retention refers to a business’s or organization’s ability to keep its employees around. The employee retention rate can be defined with a simple figure, but the process of employee retention can be a bit more complex.
The Importance Of Employee Retention
Employee turnover is an inevitable part of any business. Even if employees plan on sticking around for years to come, plans can someday change and leave them looking for a new employer.
However, it’s essential for businesses to prioritize employee retention. That’s because turnover can be extremely detrimental to a company if it starts to get out of control.
It takes valuable time and money to hire and onboard new employees. So each time someone leaves the company, it can be costly.
In fact, it usually costs around 50% of their salary to replace an entry-level worker.
Many employers view turnover as something that can’t be fixed or improved. But that’s so far from the truth!
Often, employees leave when they feel undervalued or believe there is no room for growth at their current company. 94% of employees stated that they would stay longer at a company if their workplace invested in helping them learn.
Without a doubt, employee retention is crucial. But how do you improve it?
What Are The Five Main Drivers Of Employee Retention?
When it comes to employee retention, there are five main principles that govern it. This includes strong leadership, frequent feedback, opportunities for advancement, a good work-life balance, and competitive compensation packages.
If you want to implement successful employee retention strategies, then you need to pay close attention to these five drivers.
1 – Strong Leadership
No one wants to work someplace where the boss is a stuck-up, toxic commander. Poor leaders are often the reason for many employees quitting their jobs.
One study even shows that 50% of employees left their job just to get away from their manager in order to improve their life and career.
2 – Frequent Feedback
Consistent feedback provides job clarity, offers employee recognition, and builds trust with leadership. Regular feedback encourages employees to stick around because it shows that management cares and is invested in how their employees are doing.
3 – Opportunities For Advancement
Research shows that employees who spend their time learning at work are less likely to be stressed and more likely to feel productive and successful.
To retain employees, you need to let them know they have a meaningful future at the company. Learning opportunities and room for advancement are both great ways to do exactly that.
4 – A Good Work-Life Balance
Everyone needs a hearty break from their daily work lives. Many employees often leave their jobs because they feel like they can’t truly enjoy their home lives the way they should be able to.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, employees were able to benefit from remote or hybrid work. And now, flexibility is a must for many workers!
5 – Competitive Compensation Packages
Regardless of how many exciting outings and pizza days you offer your employees, sometimes the thing they need is cold, hard cash.
Salaries and benefits are considered one of the main drivers of turnover, and many employees only stick around if they believe they are paid what they’re worth.
What Can Be Done To Retain Existing Employees?
There are many ways to retain employees and ensure you create an atmosphere they want to stay in. The key is to find a way that works for you and your team!
However, as we said, a big chunk of people that leave companies are new hires. Before even hitting their six-month anniversary at the company, a third of all new hires quit.
Luckily, there’s one great way to combat this. Before your new employees are fully settled into their new roles, you need to ensure they undergo an excellent onboarding experience.
Perhaps you don’t buy into the magic of a great onboarding process. However, a good onboarding program leads to about 69% of employees staying at least three years. And a poor onboarding experience alone is the reason for about 9% of all employees quitting.
These stats are a bit alarming, to say the least. Who knew that merely ensuring you have a great onboarding program implemented would affect turnover so much?
The Power Of Excellent Onboarding
Onboarding has two crucial elements that are great for improving employee retention. The first is informational, and the second is cultural.
An onboarding process that utilizes things like great training will ensure your employees are truly set up to thrive in their new roles. But onboarding also introduces workers to the company’s culture and ensures they feel welcomed and at home.
#2. Take Time To Recognize Your Employees
One of the most trusted employee retention strategies utilizes plenty of employee recognition. 79% of employees that leave companies do so because they feel underappreciated.
That’s why taking time to recognize and reward the hard work of your team is so important!
Your employees deserve to feel like their efforts are noticed and appreciated. No one likes to go through their life feeling unseen and taken for granted.
Luckily, there are countless ways to acknowledge and recognize your team. Even a simple “thank you,” or high five can go a long way at the end of the day!
The Best Way To Treat Your Team Right
If you want to truly boost employee engagement and offer recognition to your team, you should host a company event.
Company events are perfect for connecting your employees to the organization and helping them find purpose in their work. Plus, it encourages everyone to build positive relationships and get to know each other outside of the office.
Company events in and of themselves can help boost employee retention. But it wouldn’t be possible without the right event speaker.
A Speaker To Treat Your Team Right
With a corporate comedian, you can truly treat your team to the amazing experience they deserve. And with Clean Comedians® running the show, you can rest easy knowing that your employees will get to indulge in some amazing entertainment!
All our speakers are clean, meaning they use no profanity, no prejudice, and no politics in their acts. That means that everyone in the audience will get to truly feel at ease, included, and comfortable.
This would also be the perfect opportunity to start an employee recognition program like employee of the month. Get in the habit of rewarding efforts, not results!
Bonus: 4 Creative Branding Ideas That Will Make Humor The Focus Of Your Next Event
#3. Empower Employees Through Learning Opportunities
Your team wants to know that they have a future and a way to grow themselves at your company. Oftentimes, workers leave because they feel unchallenged and bored in their roles.
It’s important to offer learning and growth opportunities for your team. And there are a few ways to do this.
Offer Mentorship Programs
Peer-matching and mentorship programs are great ways to improve employee retention. It gives workers a chance to learn something new in a comfortable and intimate environment with other top performers in the company.
Rather than relying on their manager to hold their hand, employees can actually benefit from a less-intimidating way to learn.
It also makes learning much more effective and efficient by building trust between the two parties.
Invest In Training
There’s nothing more frustrating than feeling unprepared for your own job. And when managers drop the ball in training, their employees are the ones that suffer.
It’s important to take time to invest in properly training your team. When they fully understand the basics of their roles, it’s easier for them to grow and prosper.
That way, they can spend less time learning the company software and more time thinking of more efficient and innovative ways to get work done!
#4. Offer Flexibility In Your Employee’s Roles
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many workers started to rethink their careers and how they looked. Instead of spending forty hours a week at the same old desk, they started to prefer to work from home.
Of course, remote or hybrid work isn’t feasible for all different types of jobs and industries. But offering flexibility is a great way to retain your employees.
Workplace flexibility is about more than merely working from home. It’s also about vacation days, a healthy work-life balance, or open shifts. It means creating work arrangments that are more agreeable to your team and their wants and needs.
As long as your team can get the work done, allowing workers to complete their tasks on their own time can offer amazing benefits.
In fact, 59% of workers have stated that they favor flexibility over salary and benefits. And 90% of employees that can work remotely want to!
Remote and hybrid work has taken over, and even if companies try to push it away, it’s likely not going anywhere for a while. By giving your team what they want, you can ensure that you create the foundation for their retention.
Wrapping Up
Creating a workplace that your employees can be happy to be a part of isn’t always easy. You have different people to please and hoops to jump through. But, at the end of the day, cultivating a healthy and enjoyable workplace is how you’ll get your team to stick around!
Employee retention can seem like a complicated topic at first. However, as long as you know the best ways to prioritize your employees, it’ll be easy to keep them around.
By treating your team right and improving the workplace, your employees will be happy to be a part of your company for years to come!
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Adam Christing is a professional comedy magician, virtual MC, and the founder of CleanComedians.com. He is a member of the world-famous Magic Castle in Hollywood and a popular corporate entertainer, magician, and virtual speaker.