Employee retention is increasingly critical in today’s climate, serving as a way to limit the impact of labor shortages and reduce the need for ongoing hiring. Often, reducing turnover requires specific approaches, ensuring the members of your workforce are getting what it requires to remain satisfied in their roles. In many cases, some simple steps can have a dramatic impact on turnover.
If you need to improve employee retention, here are three tips that actually work.
1. Keep Compensation Competitive
Generally speaking, it’s true that compensation alone isn’t enough to ensure job satisfaction. However, subpar pay rates or benefits packages will work against your company, even if the culture is positive and strong and the work is rewarding overall.
Ultimately, compensation needs to be competitive for your industry, at a minimum, in regard to your local area if you aren’t hiring remote employees in other regions. By doing so, you ensure that salaries and benefits packages aren’t a motivator to seek out other opportunities, reducing a key source of job satisfaction that often leads to turnover.
2. Provide Ongoing Training with Clear Paths for Advancement
The majority of your employees likely have career aspirations beyond their current roles. As a result, most want to ensure they have proper opportunities to advance as well as grow professionally while in their current positions.
Companies should strive to provide ongoing training in skills areas relevant to an employee’s position today, as well as what they may need if they advance into a higher-level role. Additionally, make sure that promotional pathways are clear and reasonably concrete.
Ideally, managers should also offer coaching to workers to put them on the path toward their goals. Promoting internally should similarly become the norm, as that shows your workforce that those who do the work will have a chance to move up.
Plus, training and professional development benefit the company, making it easier to close skill gaps. As a result, it’s a win-win that can boost retention, job satisfaction, and your bottom line.
3. Conduct Stay Interviews to Learn About Employee Needs
While the two tips above speak to universal workforce needs, they may not address the concerns of every individual. With stay interviews, managers have an opportunity to engage with employees one-on-one and learn about potential organizational shortcomings that may ultimately drive them away.
Ideally, you want to make sure these conversations are conducted in the proper manner. Managers should avoid getting defensive regarding what employees share. Additionally, using active listening techniques and asking clarifying questions makes it easier to get to the heart of the matter.
Finally, make sure to track which concerns can be remedied immediately and which may require several steps to achieve a resolution. Additionally, look for commonalities as managers speak with their teams, as the same topic being introduced repeatedly could indicate an area that should become a priority.
Reach Out to Our Experts at The Advance Group
Ultimately, all three of the employee retention tips above can make a meaningful difference. If you’d like to learn more about how you can reduce turnover or are seeking top talent for your open positions, the team at The Advance Group wants to hear from you. Contact us today.
