Employee retention is an excellent barometer for how connected the employees are with
each other and the company. It plays a crucial role in employee retention since an engaged
employee will unlikely leave a company, contributing to a more robust company culture.
Poor employee retention results in a higher turnover rate, meaning more employees leave for
other opportunities. As a result, the company will suffer from decreased productivity due to
lack of workforce and expensive recruitment campaigns.
Avoid your company’s employee retention drop with the following strategies:
Improve Employee Work-Life Balance
Most employees don’t wish to exhaust all their waking hours working. Many will likely take a
less demanding job even though it means a smaller salary than staying in a role that doesn’t
allow downtime.
Hence, as the employer or HR manager, acknowledging and facilitating work-life balance is a
must to retain employees. To do so, ensure each employee has the right amount of work per
day and personal time by properly auditing workloads.
Not only workloads but employees or managers should also know how to monitor their
members and the times they’re overwhelmed. Some websites can help employees or
managers to get better at managing people.
Check https://www.oneadvanced.com/en-au/solutions/people-management-software/ for
example. This site offers employees or managers digital solutions for supporting and
empowering employees to the best of their ability.
Communication is another way. Regularly talking to the employees helps employers or
managers recognize those dissatisfied or about to hit burnout with their workload. Having
these conversations before deadlines can help adjust schedules with minimal disruption to
the deliverables.
Invest in Employee Wellness
Employee work-life balance should go hand-in-hand with an employee wellness program. It
should ideally support employees’ well-being, including their mental, physical, and
emotional health, to ensure employee engagement and retention.
There are several ways to invest in employees’ health, for example:
● Add mental health services coverage to basic employee benefits;
● Offer on-site wellness classes or corporate-sponsored gym memberships; or
● Provide employees with a monthly health stipend.
Overall, employee wellness plans can help employees to be their best. When they’re at their
best, they likely find it easy to feel engaged with their work and want to stay with the
company.
Make Employees Feel Valued
One of the driving factors of a lack of engagement that employees often cite is a lack of
recognition. Avoid this by placing great importance on each employee’s achievement,
encouraging them in their work, and recognizing their efforts through fun employee
recognition ideas.
A “shout-outs” side of your company town hall is a great way to recognize each employee’s
contribution that helps other employees and the management overall. This doesn’t only
Employers and managers can do so monthly or quarterly (particularly in the last month of the
quarter) but not annually.
Listen to Employees
According to Forbes, workers dedicate more than a third of their lives to working. This may
mean that for many, their work is one of the defining factors of their identities. Hence, with so
much of themselves invested in their work, it’s understandable why they want to be heard.
If not heard, employees will likely quit and find other better opportunities. After all, they only
live once, so why settle for a place where they can’t find satisfaction? That’s why if a company
prioritizes engagement and retention, listening to employees is important.
The good part of collecting employee feedback is that it benefits both employees and
employers. It enables employees to voice out their inputs on issues that matter to them and
gives employers valuable insights into employees’ experiences and new engagement ideas.
Another way to listen to the employees is by recognizing workforce pain points and creating a
plan to address them. Otherwise, employee morale will go down, which usually leads to a
higher turnover.
Provide Professional Development Opportunities
Being in a rut kills engagement. Doing the same tasks every single day for years can inevitably
lose employees’ interest in work. Prevent this by providing them with relevant challenges to
conquer in their day-to-day work and professional development opportunities, such as
employee coaching.
The first step is to clearly set career paths in the organization. Let them know what it takes to
get promoted and earn higher. Then, don’t leave them alone and instead offer training,
coaching, or mentorship opportunities that can help them to move up.
While this may sound like another expense on the company’s end, investment in employees’
learning and development can bring a lot of advantages to the company. These include
increased not only job satisfaction and higher retention but also increased productivity.
Final Thoughts
Plan employee engagement strategies ahead of time. This initiative should outline the
company’s engagement goals, people involved, and measurement methods. Sharing it with
other employees can greatly help in gauging which options are better. Remember employee
engagement isn’t about the company, but employees. Hence, the key is listening to collecting
employee feedback.
