How Businesses Should Retain Their Best Employees
So once you find the right people, it’s also in your best interest to keep them. This is beneficial for multiple reasons.
Firstly, hiring a new employee is costly. They also have to be trained for a particular period before you can expect them to achieve base competence level.
Secondly, having your employees stay is a good indication that your company culture is working.
While incentives, benefits, and a high salary grade can definitely attract top talent to your organization, they don’t really set the criteria for job satisfaction. To see what works and what doesn’t, you have to look somewhere else.
Exit interviews may give you an insight into why your employees are leaving.
Similarly, regular one-on-ones or company surveys can help you glean input as to the status of employees’ job satisfaction.
Whatever the reasons you’ll eventually find out, there’s no better time than now to employ strategies that can help you improve employee morale, raise feelings of career gratification in the workplace, and retain your top talent.
Here are some proven actions that work.
Promote Based on Proper Merit
When an employee excels beyond expectations, shows great work ethics, and excellent workplace attitude, take this opportunity to show to everyone that you appreciate them. An incentive works. In most cases, the employee is promoted.A promotion is indeed a powerful reward tool. You’d want your people at the top to be the cream of the crop.
So you should reward based on the proper set of criteria, assessing not only their skill competence but also the values they uphold. Aim for people with high conscientiousness and those whom you have trusted time and again to make wise decisions.
However, be careful in removing people from their comfort zones.
It’s possible that they may be performing well where they are now because they love what they do and a new position may not be compatible with their range of skill sets. A promotion may seem like a reward, but it can become counterproductive when not given scrupulously.
Follow Their Advice
Your best resource as to how to make internal processes better are the very people who do these things on a daily basis.They have fully immersed themselves in the system and are familiar with its strengths and flaws. If you want to improve company processes, there’s no one better to talk to than the employees themselves.
Involving your employees in the development direction of the company will make them feel empowered. So it’s important that you create an environment within the workplace that makes it easy for them to voice their feedback and suggestions and where it’s easy to be honest and upfront about certain policies.
This will help you create a better flow of policy discussions where there’s a massive potential for valuable input about how the systems should be changed and what everyone will need to achieve and understand so all can proceed harmoniously toward a unified goal.
Being an empowered part of a greater collective also gives them a sense of affiliation to something that treats them not just a figure but a functioning employee.
Clarify Goals and Expectations
It’s hard to hit the mark if you don’t know which mark you should be aiming for.For you to make a better assessment of asset performance, you should be able to hold a clear rubric of what should be delivered.
Setting your expectations right makes it a lot easier for everyone to spend their energy and focus on the right things. So see to it that expectations are not only clearly communicated upon hiring but also regularly followed up via one-on-one sessions and evaluations.
This principle should flow into other aspects of company management especially in the implementation of company policies. Because policies are broken-down transliterations of universal company values, it’s important to keep employees in the know of why certain policies are in place.
You should be especially transparent in matters that have a legal foundation, like drug use, where there are possibly conflicting legal stances in both state and federal levels, such as in the case of marijuana use.
In which case, it will be helpful to hold a conversation among your staff and employees to clarify gray areas, air out confusion, and provide professional advice on drug testing, health-related drug use, and the sometimes-fine line between professional responsibility and personal necessity.
Make Them Compete
Work can easily become boring and monotonous in so many ways that even the most passionate of the bunch can sometimes slip into a state of apathy.So why not spice it up with a little challenge from time to time?
People love games. And if they’re good at what they’d do, a competition will be a welcome break from the banality of the daily grind.
Have different teams work on a similar goal, and carve out a deadline. You’ll realize that it’s not really the reward they’re after but the welcome change of pace and their clear mark of productivity that encourages them to demonstrate their creative and critical thinking that makes sweet, fulfilling victory.
Never Micromanage
If you want your good employees to flourish, you need to get off their backs.While pressure can sometimes be a productive force, it becomes antagonistic in the long run. You need to allow your talents the freedom to do what needs to be done in their own way and in the time that they’re allowed.
This will not only help build trust among individual staff units but also encourage them to innovate and approach challenges creatively.
Final Word
Recognizing the power of the individual and his or her potential to positively impact your organization is the key tenet of every employee retention strategy.Many businesses look at their organization as a profit-obtaining endeavor, but what they fail to realize is that it can only be possible by proper asset management. And what’s your best and biggest asset other than a human resource?
Implement these strategies, and see employee productivity, morale, and engagement ramp up toward peak performance in no time.
