HR professionals and business executives know that employee retention is a strategic action to keep employees productive and within the company.
The most important thing to understand is that employee retention while having many benefits, will significantly impact your bottom line. Hiring and training new employees can be expensive, so it’s best to retain current talent before looking elsewhere.
How to Increase Employee Retention
1. Career Development
A lack of career development is one of the top reasons employers decide to give up their jobs these days. Millennials are all about opportunities and growth, so make sure to give them an option to climb that ladder.
2. Health Benefits
If you want to boost retention, creating an attractive healthcare plan is an excellent way to go.
Both recruits and existing employees will value good health benefits. It’s not a secret that most people leave their much-loved jobs because they want to have high-grade healthcare.
However, if outstanding health benefits are too expensive for you, try to implement health initiatives.
Don’t stretch the already stretched budget with costly healthcare and try to promote a healthier lifestyle instead.
3. Salary Boost
A salary boost is a powerful retention strategy but has to be performed in the right way.
Believe it or not, the initial thrill with wage increment lasts only for a couple of weeks yet costs a company a lot of money in the long run.
That’s why we recommend regular evaluations and raises within a proactive employee strategy. Even lower boosts will mean more for the employees if they are a part of the regular company practice.
4. Retirement Plan
After career and health benefits, a good retirement plan is what people value the most. Whether you’re recruiting or retaining employees, a solid retirement strategy with lots of benefits will help you in the process.
For your most valued employees, a 401(k) retirement plan might be just the perfect thing.
5. Wellness Offerings
Your primary concern should be keeping your employees mentally, physically, and financially satisfied.
Thus, promote retention by investing in wellness resources such as gym access and other healthy behaviors and physical exercises.
6. Work-Life Balance
One of the things your employees will appreciate the most is a healthy work-life balance. A culture that encourages and awards after-hours is not favorite by anyone.
Allow your staff to take their vacation time and promote flexible working hours.
Employees are more efficient when they have a healthy work-life balance, even when they spend fewer hours at work.
7. Increased Annual Leave
Employees will always value the annual leave perks. You can add an extra day off for employees’ birthdays or Christmas shopping.
Additional annual leave benefits will improve retention and staff productivity.
8. Transparent and Respectful Communication
This strategy is easy to perform and won’t cost you anything.
Transparent and respectful communication should be the center of your HR department and company culture.
Encourage employees to share their concerns, ask for help and guidance, and overall, freely communicate with executives. That will help them feel comfortable within the company and enhance their performance.
9. Education Benefits
The need for university or continued education is still strong among employees. Many of them will say that paid job training and tuition reimbursement are pretty crucial for their satisfaction.
The benefits available to employees of your company may vary based on the needs of each specific department but can retain employees.
10. Discounts
Lastly, we shouldn’t forget that employees often spend more time with co-workers than with family members in the company.
Thus, employees would appreciate entertainment perks and discounts to spend more time with their family and enjoy movies, amusement parks, sports, and other attractions.
Too many managers are trying to fix retention problems by treating symptoms, not the underlying issues.
Companies can drastically improve employee retention by hiring new staff members with different needs and skills or even replacing an employee with someone from a diverse background.
HR professionals can control the quality of both recruiting and selection processes to ensure that the company has a pipeline of talent coming in the door that will yield a higher percentage of successful hires.
In this way, HR becomes a partner rather than just a service provider, which is especially important for small-to-medium sized businesses where HR functions may not be present or have been outsourced to less experienced sources like temp agencies or recruiters.
Although health insurance and finances are crucial for most employees, other benefits can improve the company culture and increase retention rates.
