Managing Retention – A Step by Step Guide
Written by Andrew Johnson, Founder and CEO HRGuide - Thu 10th Oct 2024
Introduction
Recruiting new employees is time consuming and costly. The average cost of recruiting employees in the UK varies widely depending on the role but it's not uncommon for the total cost to run into the many thousands over and above an employee’s salary. Therefore, retaining existing employees is essential, ensuring stability, knowledge retention, productivity and continuity in service to customers.
Post covid we have seen thousands of employees from multiple sectors leave the workplace. Reports indicate it may be due to inadequate salaries, limited career advancement, poor work-life balances, general unhappiness with management or the company and numerous other reasons. This has turned employment into a worker’s market.
Employers are having to consider what makes their company worth working for? It is worth considering some employee retention strategies to ensure you retain your top talent both now and in the future. Detailed below are some effective strategies to retain your workforce.
1. Offer Competitive Base Salaries or Hourly Wages
One of the simplest ways of attracting and retaining good people is to simply pay them competitively. Making sure you are paying in the upper quartile of local pay rates for the jobs you offer will define you as an employer of choice and make your employees feel their work is valued.
Not only should employees be paid fairly for their time and work, but they should also be able to afford the cost of living where they live, their wages should be regularly adjusted for rising inflation, and they should be additionally compensated as their experience level with the work grows. Additionally, every time their responsibility increases, so too should workers’ reward increase. Benchmarking your salaries every year or two will give you valuable insight and allow you to retain valuable talent and stop them looking elsewhere.
2. Let Your Employees Work From Home!!!
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic practically all employees experienced what it was like to work from home and they enjoyed the experience. Remote working has been shown to make employees happier and more productive at work. With modern technology, working entirely (or even partially) from home is possible in a vast array of industries. The positive effects of working from home include a reduction of nonessential meetings, increased schedule flexibility, commute elimination, fewer distractions and greater autonomy. When your employees do not have to spend time sitting in traffic, stressing about childcare or losing productivity due to scheduling issues or lengthy meetings, they will be more productive and happier. Whilst most employers would like to see their employees at work offering flexible work-from-home options may be an incentive to keep the best employees with your company for the long run.
3. Provide Flexible Scheduling and Reduced Workdays
Along with offering remote working, studies from the CIPD also show businesses offering more flexible work options maintain significantly better worker retention. A study in 2019 showed that If you can flex the working day so employees can start earlier or later or even offer the same weekly working hours across 4 days and not 5 then nearly two-thirds of workers found themselves more productive outside of a traditional office due to fewer interruptions, fewer distractions and less commuting. Offering your employees flexible hours encourages them to find the times they will be most efficient and productive to focus attention on the work.
4. Encourage and Promote a Work-life Balance
Encouraging and promoting a good work-life balance—not just for your employees, but for yourself, as a busy business owner/operator too. Work-life balance could come by means of remote work, flexible scheduling or reduced workdays, as mentioned above, or simpler acts such as encouraging employees not to check email or answer work questions via phone unless at work or on the job. Respecting employees’ time away from work is key to maintaining a healthy working relationship with them.
5. Recognize and Reward Your Employees for Their Work
Employees who feel appropriately recognized and rewarded by workplaces are much easier to retain long term. Equally, they are more likely to work harder and be more productive. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2023 Report nearly 90% of UK employees are disengaged from their job and are either quiet or loud quitting. With just 10% of workers feeling engaged or thriving in the workplace, the UK is ranked 33rd on Gallup’s table of employee engagement in European countries. If you prioritize recognizing your employees which might be as simple as a thankyou at the end of a busy day or more formally recognizing them through an “employee of the month” type scheme you will see increased employee retention and engagement.
There are numerous ways to recognize and reward your employees, but it is important to make sure you prioritize both social recognition and monetary rewards. It feels good to not only be recognized for our work, but to be publicly recognized, as it helps everyone know when others are appreciated, too. Financial rewards, whether in the form of straightforward cash, gift cards or even other perks such as paid time off, are among the most important and most successful rewards you can offer an employee. Consider asking employees open-ended questions about what they’d like in terms of rewards, too.
6. Develop great Managers
We know that the fundamental reason any employee ever leaves their job is because of a bad manager. A good manager, on the other hand, acts not as a “boss” but as a “coach.” The key difference being that while a boss is seen as an unsatisfiable source of demand micromanaging every aspect of employees’ work, a coach knows their employees are players on a team. A good employer/coach works to guide employees in the right direction by offering advice, support and goals while still allowing their workers to have a high degree of autonomy. If you train your managers to be inspiring leaders and great coaches they will naturally create a culture of engagement and retain the best talent.
7. Give your employees a voice by making them feel listened to and showing them that their opinions matter.
One of the most important strategies for employee retention is to build up your workers’ engagement with your organization. Try introducing opportunities for your employees to feel safe giving candid feedback. It is likely that your workers may know more about the best ways to accomplish a given task than you do if they have been doing it longer, so giving them the opportunity to communicate and collaborate on improvements to workflow and the work environment will help employees feel like they had a hand in developing culture and ensure they remain engaged with the company.
8. Create an Emphasis on Teamwork
Another key part of employee retention in some environments is creating a strong emphasis on teamwork. Creating chances for collaboration—including interdepartmental collaboration—can promote not only teamwork, but overall employee engagement. Strong teamwork not only encourages bonding between coworkers, which can create a better overall culture, but it also drives higher overall performance. Good teamwork will help managers and employees pair up strengths and weaknesses within departments and more strategically balance the workload.
9. Reduce Employee Burnout
A 2020 Gallup report, Employee Burnout: Causes and Cures, found that 76% of employees sometimes experience burnout on the job and 28% stating they feel burnout “often” or “always.” Whilst it is often assumed burnout is caused by overwork and can be solved by taking days off or reducing work hours, Gallup’s study found burnout is more influenced by how employees experience their workload than the literal number of hours they work. Employees who feel more engaged by their work, who are properly recognized and rewarded and who are offered better job flexibility via reduced hours, remote work or flexible scheduling report higher well-being.
The Gallup report found the top five factors that lead to employee burnout are:
- Unfair treatment at work
- Unmanageable workload
- Unclear communication from management
- Lack of manager support
- Unreasonable time pressure
Developing and improving your overall company culture, building better employee engagement and offering clear communication, consistent management and transparency will all help reduce employee burnout.
10. Give Other Job Perks
There are many and varied additional job perks you can give your employees. These include Helplines for health and finance, discounted healthcare, share schemes, car schemes. In addition, by signing up to one of the many benefits hubs your employees can get access to a myriad of local discounted retail offers. These benefits are often relatively low cost but seen as high value to your employees.
Employee retention is incredibly important to the operation of a successful business. The strategies outlined above are not an automatic fix but many of the necessary actions that ensure your employees feel recognized and rewarded and in doing so remain engaged and loyal to your business.
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Having a clear strategy to retain your employees is a powerful tool to successfully drive your business’s performance whilst maintaining a positive engaged workforce.
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