Employee retention has become a significant part of businesses. Certainly, when a company is able to retain its top talent when required, it stays on the right track, which helps it achieve its organizational goals and become successful.
Considering the importance of retaining the employees, the hardworking ones especially, this article discusses the seven strategies that can help a company in retaining its top talent in particular and overall employee retention in general.
Strategies for better employee retention
1. Frequent individual meetings
While a meeting that includes no significant aspect brings no value, it, at the same time, is not welcomed by the employees either. However, it should not make a company avoid conducting meetings altogether, or precisely, face-to-face interactions.
Your employees may not welcome the idea of unnecessary meetings, but having an interaction with the top executives is one of the ways that can keep them motivated and on the course of action. Additionally, it is one of the ways you can keep your top talent retained and also improve overall employee retention.
An important consideration in this regard is not to mistake the group meetings with those that take place individually. Many companies put too much emphasis on conducting the meetings as a whole while neglecting the one-on-one altogether, which should not be the case at all.
The group meetings bring their own use when all the teams, or the members of a team, are required to be together for a discussion. They, however, may not bring any considerable use when it comes to employee retention. That being the case, individual employee retention should be emphasized, at least for retaining your talented employees.
One way to make your in-person interaction successful is by making it as meaningful as possible. Moreover, while it should be brief, you should ensure that it should be long enough so that the very employee and their subsequent concern – if any, is sufficiently discussed.
One of the main reasons why having an in-person interaction with your employees has become necessary is the last pandemic. Besides impacting the world economically, it also brought a detrimental effect on the mental health of people all over the globe. It is especially true for the employees who were not only subject to financial constraints but were also hit psychologically due to the pandemic.
In conclusion, it’s a good idea to carry out individual meetings with your employees. It helps in employee retention of your top talent by preventing them from shifting their jobs. In addition to this, it can also prove effective in countering the negative effects of the pandemic on the mental health of the employees.
2. Performing employee recognition
A simple trick that helps you retain top talent is to acknowledge whatever good they bring to the company. Naturally, a talented employee is more often than not the one that outperforms others. So, appreciating them for their performance is the least you can do to keep them retained.
It should not be hard for you to identify your star performers. You can make use of different metrics that help you determine who outshined the other. Whatever the method you choose to find the top performers at your workplace, don’t forget to recognize and reward your worthy employees so as to keep them retained.
3. Improving remote work culture
It has pretty much become normal today for the employees to work remotely. While the pandemic is the foremost reason for remote work to become added to the company culture, the advancement in the technology and tools that enable effective remote collaborations also has a role to play in it.
Making remote work more productive can play an important role in your employee retention in the long run. A more productive remote work adds to the performance of an employee, making the employee and the employer both satisfied. As a result, employee retention is affected positively.
If in remote work, the employees are not giving the required levels of output and, therefore, not being valuable, it puts in question the efforts of the employees. Apart from this, since neither the company nor the employees are happy in such a situation, it leads to reduced employee retention.
We outline some of the ways a company can adopt to improve its remote work culture to keep the retention of the employees to the desired level:
- Establish a clearly explained hierarchy concerning employee communication.
- What you expect from every team and each of its members should be clear.
- Make everyone accountable equally, from lower-ranked employees to the managers alike.
- A positive work culture makes a workplace thrive. The same is true for a digital workplace. Make efforts to make remote working positive as much as possible.
The last piece of advice for making the virtual collaborations among the employees efficient is to keep the help channels open that guide the employees whenever they’re stuck in the digital workspace. One of the main reasons for an unsuccessful remote working is the absence of such channels that guide the employees out of a difficulty.
Lastly, ensuring that your remote work culture is productive and not counterproductive will automatically affect your employee retention positively.
4. Empowering professional growth
With adequate career opportunities, a company invests not only in its employees but in their careers as well. Allowing your employees to grow professionally by making them enhance their skillset and knowledge makes them feel they belong with the company. It makes them believe that the organization values their success as much as it values its own, which is more than likely to keep them employed with the very company.
A usual way to empower the employees professionally is by helping them acquire the most sought-after skills that will take them forward in their respective careers. Furthermore, employees can also be made to have formal education by providing them with the flexibility and the financial resources to pursue further education.
When a company allows its employees in their career development, it leads it to have robust overall employee retention.
5. Successful employee onboarding
One of the strategies that will help you retain the top talent is an effective employee onboarding process. A successful employee onboarding leaves a lasting impact on the decision of the employees to stay with a company.
An important consideration in regard to onboarding your employees successfully is that it should not be viewed as a one-time process. Not only this, an effective employee onboarding is the result of the collective efforts of everyone involved in the very process.
Of course, how you onboard your new employees impacts their turnover (both voluntary and non-voluntary). It is why companies today spend a considerable amount of resources on their employee onboarding process as an employee retention strategy.
6. Beyond the money factor
The newer generation of millennials and Gen Z is increasingly adding to the workforce globally. The thing with the employees of the new generation is that money is not everything they work for. Yes, it holds significance for them, but not as much as it does for the older or previous generation of employees.
It is rather difficult to retain such employees for whom the monetary value is not sufficient since such employees consider other aspects of the job as well in regard to their job satisfaction. Furthermore, utilizing the monetary benefits may also not help in the employee retention of the newer generation employees.
It is necessary for the companies to think beyond the money factor to retain their top and young talent. A company should strive for ways that can inspire the younger employees to keep working for it. It is important that such employees do not consider themselves stuck in meaningless jobs.
 An inspirational workplace can be achieved by developing a work culture that is rich in morale and inspiration, the one that gives meaning to the work of employees and they don’t feel like wage workers. Such a culture will help the employees belonging to the newer generation to believe that they are not working for money only and that their work holds value.
Read: Employee Retention Strategies That Work!
7. Flexibility factor
Another strategy that can help a company in its employee retention is flexibility. Though it comes last on the list, it is certainly one of the important approaches in this regard.
As has always been the case, during the traditional work hours, employees are required to be working between 9 to 5. In such a system, whenever employees are unable to follow these timings, they are reported to HR, and at times they have to face salary deductions. Clearly, it leads to anyone quitting in a workplace that enforces the traditional timings.
Another feature of flexible working is that it does not require the employees to come to the office in order to work. This being the reason, they can even choose the place to work.
Understandably, flexible work timings are one of the ways a company can charm talented individuals. Also, using it, it can keep its skilled employees working and can, thus, avoid voluntary turnover.
In order to not let any ambiguity surround the understanding of the flexible work timings, you can consider it as the freedom that the employees have in terms of the time and place for work. Such flexibility helps a company to achieve its goals quicker by maximizing the presence and skill of the workforce. Besides, it also empowers the employees to align the company goals with their individual. And this leads to the ideal employee retention levels.
Lastly, giving flexibility to your employees to work comes with the following benefits:
- The overall productivity at your workplace, more than likely, becomes higher.
- One of the important advantages of providing ease to employees in regard to work is that it does not negatively affect the employee’s mental well-being negatively. In fact, it improves the physical as well as the mental state of an employee since there is no added pressure due to the rigid work timing.
- Another significant benefit of enforcing flexible timings is that it tends to reduce the absenteeism of employees. Subsequently, the overall workplace productivity increases.
- The creativity of your employees may also improve when they work in a flexible working environment.
- The overall employee morale of your company may also improve with the employees free to work at the time and place of their choice.
- With the employees having the freedom to work from anywhere and at their desired time, it gives them a sense of control over their lives. With such empowerment, employees are better able to balance their work and life, leading them to become happier than the employees having little to no work-life balance.
The aforementioned benefits that the flexibility factor brings to a company clearly add to the happiness and satisfaction of the employees with their work and the company. It, therefore, makes it easier to retain such employees and keep them working for a company for a longer period.
What to conclude?
Employee retention today is nothing short of a financial gain. While it does not provide a monetary value directly, having a better level of it eventually leads a company to have monetary benefits too. There is no lack of approaches as well that help in retaining the employees. However, the efficiency of such an approach and its output depends on how willing a company is to keep its top talent working for it.
One of the conclusions is that when employees are satisfied, it makes them stay with a company. One of the ways to achieve employee satisfaction is through employee rewards and recognition. You can get yourself more familiar with rewarding and appreciating employees by booking a demo.
