What Is Employee Retention? A Guide for Businesses

What is employee retention? Check out this guide to understanding what employee retention is and why your business can’t thrive without it.

What is Employee Retention?

In it’s simplest definition, employee retention is the number of employees you keep after hiring them. Most equations used to measure employee retention includes a fixed period of time as the baseline.

Employees who aren’t vested, or with the company for a certain amount of time, aren’t typically included. For example, if you have employees who didn’t make it through the training process.

Losing these new employees isn’t due to a retention problem. Why is keeping employees so important?

In some industries, the competition for good talent is fierce. If you’re constantly losing employees to competitors, there’s a good chance there’s a major problem with how you’re running your business.

Getting to the heart of employee retention strategies helps you narrow down what’s going wrong.

Finding the Right Employee Retention Strategy

There’s no such thing as a perfect workplace. All companies are dynamic and have to deal with problems in real-time.

You won’t be able to address every employee’s concern simply by increasing pay or allowing more time off. Some problems stem from poor company culture.

Toxic company culture can lead to poor policymaking or a lack of enforcement of policies in place. This leads to job insecurity. If employees don’t feel secure in their positions, they’ll leave for something better at the first opportunity.

Retraining new staff is expensive and time-consuming. You can avoid this loss in productivity time by trying out a few employee retention strategies.

Pay More

Do market research to make sure your pay rates are comparable to competitors. Employees with a solid set of skills will have their pick of top paid positions in your industry.

If you want to retain them, make sure you’re compensation packages are on par with everyone else. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to pay a higher salary to remain competitive.

You might need a better benefits package. Simply offering a second or third week of vacation time could be enough to keep their attention.

Healthcare is a must if you work in a field where talent is scarce. Look at ways to make your benefits packages look more attractive so your employees appreciate your offer over any others they receive.

Rewards

Another way to keep the attention of employees is to reward good behavior. Many employees feel that recognition at work is lacking.

Make sure your team feels appreciated by offering bonuses, awards and other recognition efforts. A company party or retreat to a desirable location goes a long way.

Make sure anything you offer increases each year. You expect employees to bring more sales and productivity in each year.

You should follow suit by increasing their rewards relative to what they produce.

Better Company Culture

Things like hazing and toxic competition get you nowhere. Some employers think that competitive employees earn them more for their money since everyone is trying to perform at their top level.

But it’s bad for teamwork and fosters an environment where trust is impossible. You won’t get exponential benefits when you pair two talented teammates together to tackle a client problem.

You’ll get bickering and sabotage that can cost you money. If you’re not encouraging a positive work environment, you’re wasting money on talent.

You won’t ever know what your team could accomplish if they gave their best ideas to a project without fear of backstabbing. Hold regular workshops on teamwork and trust-building.

Reward employees who collaborate and demote those who don’t. You’re setting the tone that you won’t tolerate toxic behavior that distracts employees from their performance.

Good Mental Health

You’ll only retain a certain type of a person if your work environment is toxic. Toxic work cultures include no work-life balance.

Employees sleeping at work or having to take calls over the weekend might seem ok for a while. But in time, they’ll lose the desire to be married to work.

You want to foster good mental health in your workplace. Give employees vacation time they can actually take.

Find ways to help employees who seem stressed by sending them to mental health professionals who can provide productive ways to cope. At the close of a busy quarter, implement a half-day so employees can focus on self-care.

Hire a massage therapist to come on-site and help your team relieve much-needed stress. These are all gestures that express your gratitude and attention to their wellbeing.

Coaching

Many employees join an organization for the promise of being able to move up in a certain amount of time. They’ll need mentors and opportunities presented so they can prove themselves.

Make sure your leadership is open to coaching employees who want to improve their performance. Ambition can be a healthy addition to your team when you use it the right way.

Add training sessions that are mandatory to keep everyone’s performance on a certain level. Include leadership development as an option, too.

The Road to Employee Retention

What is employee retention? It’s the process of keeping employees in place so you can focus on innovation.

A good customer retention strategy saves you money keeping your eyes on the prize and not drama in the workplace. Do your part to ensure you have a work environment where employees can thrive.

For more information and tips, visit our blog for updates.