16 Ways To Improve Your Employees’ Retention And Engagement

It is more expensive to hire new employees when compared to keeping and maintaining the talents that are already in your care. Hiring a new employee after an old one leaves can cost double the employee’s annual salary. 

For this reason, it is crucial to treat your employees right and ensure good employee retention. 

Advantages of Employee Retention.

• Consistent productivity of the organization. Your top skills and knowledge stays in the organization, making productivity consistent, and a positive outcome meets expectations every time.
• Employee morale improves. When your employee retention rate is high, the motivation to work and put in their best is always going to be there. Employees tend to appreciate their jobs more when there is motivation.
• Increase in employee engagement. Stable and passionate employees will lead to the quality effort put into their jobs. A positive environment has been proven again and again to be a very important metric in employee productivity. Employees thrive better in a positive atmosphere where they feel like their efforts are being recognized and appreciated.

Employee retention has proven to be a huge factor in the overall performance of a company. Ways in which an organization can improve its employee retention and participation include the following.

1. Always listen to employee feedback. Most importantly, employees like to be heard and respected. People tend to stay and thrive better in a place where their voices are heard and valued. Listen to your employees and always show them that you care about their opinions and views. Always address issues that they bring to your notice diplomatically; show them that you take everything they say or suggest into consideration. 
2. Offer generous benefits for employees and their families. Health benefits for employees and their families, transportation benefits for employees and even housing benefits shows that you care about your employees. Mental health benefits are also a very good consideration. 
3. Be realistic about the job from the recruitment stage. Set the right expectations for candidates while recruiting. Explicitly explain whatever challenges they might face during the role to get them prepared against any surprises that might come up after they have gotten into the role. This helps to set them up better for success when they get into the role.
4. Be empathetic. Show more understanding towards your employees and what they might be going through. Not only does it help you connect with them better, but it also gives them the impression that you do care about them and makes them feel heard. This way, they will work harder to make the company better and improve the retention rate.
5. Be transparent with your employees. Communicate with them about what is happening and where things are headed. Be honest; it will help you buy their trust and empathy and lessen their anxieties and fears about the job.
6. Introduce an internal recognition program. Celebrate employees for their achievements internally. Draw up a compensation program that will recognize the hard work employees put into their performance every month.  Not only does this motivate everyone to do better, but it also introduces healthy competition which inadvertently helps bring out the best in employees and their teams. It promotes team spirit and the retention rate becomes higher.
7. Schedule frequent one-on-one check-ins with employees. Managers should cultivate the habit of having private time with each of their team members where they discuss their job roles, goals, challenges, and their feelings towards how the company treats them. 
8. Encourage a healthy work-life balance for employees. When their work-life balance feels off, employees feel burned out and get the urge to look for another job. Encourage them to balance this by discouraging excessive work hours, advising them to take some time off for vacation, and so on. 
9. Develop their skills and make good use of the skills they already have. Through training, you can develop your employees and make them gather more skills. Workers who feel like their skills are not being put to good use are more likely to look for a new job. They are also willing to be retrained when they see the need to upskill.
10. Invest in manager training. Encourage open and effective management so that as a result, employees can have managers whom they are inspired to work for.
11. Be transparent about compensation. Doing this will help you build trust with your workforce and create a fairer pay structure. A fair pay structure will lead to satisfied employees, a higher retention rate, and better productivity.
12. Give one-time cash incentives. These incentives make employees feel appreciated and improve their loyalty to the company. Examples of incentives are bonuses, work-from-home stipends, overtime pay, and so on. 
13. Make flexible working arrangements available. Try to offer as much flexibility as possible; employees like to stay at organizations where the working arrangements are flexible and give them room to pursue other goals they might have. Workers who report being happy at their jobs feel like their companies offer more flexible options than other companies and are more likely to stay at their jobs.
14. Create a good and lasting first impression with your onboarding program. The way new hires are ushered into a company has a huge impression on how they feel about the organization. It is important to ace the onboarding process, to have a better retention rate.
15. Encourage welcoming old employees back. Having a positive exit interview for employees who want to leave is important. When you urge them to come back and welcome them back when they eventually come back, will encourage the current workforce. It will make them feel at home and welcome.
16. Encourage internal mobility. Promoting the possibility of employees being promoted or moving to new jobs in different departments within the company promotes more retention and satisfaction in their job roles. By doing this, you are not only encouraging employees to get upskilled and cross-skilled but also giving them the satisfaction of switching roles and eliminating the boredom that comes with the repetition of the responsibilities of a job role. Instead of seeking another job to kill this restlessness, all employees have to do is apply for other job roles within the company.

It has been proven time and time again that workers who feel heard, cared for, and understood work harder and take more risks, leading to higher productivity and retention. 

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