Posted on: September 16, 2024
It’s not enough simply to retain employees today: If you don’t engage them, a shifting job or economic market may mean you lose them a few months or a year down the road, costing you institutional knowledge and months or years of invested time and effort in training. Building a workplace where your employees want to stay is both a science and an art, requiring creativity and smart implementation of strategic initiatives across multiple areas.
The following tips can help you create an environment that allows you to keep the employees you need, minimizing turnover, building institutional knowledge, and generating a stronger reputation for recruiting.
- Review your hiring process. Make sure your job description, salary, and posting help you attract candidates who are the right cultural fit to succeed in the role in the long term. If you can manage a candidate’s expectations with regard to the role, your company, culture, growth potential, and benefits, you can reduce surprises that may lead to them leaving.
- Refine your onboarding process. Your corporate and benefits orientation helps new hires understand your organization’s core values and culture, and a new employee’s manager can help provide a welcoming introduction to people, policies, and their role within the company. These strong connections can prevent early turnover.
- Provide financial wellness programs. Finances are a stressor for all employees, and help managing money is something many of today’s employees appreciate. Consider offering financial advice or counseling, in addition to strong financial programs such as a retirement plan, employee stock purchase plan, health or flex savings account, and other financial tools to support employees.
- Provide competitive salary and benefits. Research the living wage in your area and what your competition is offering. Offer appropriate compensation from the start to get top talent with the best experience and culture fit for your position. Once you’ve got the right person in the position, do periodic reviews of salary to ensure you’re in a strong position to keep the person who is now trained and doing the quality of work you expect.
- Offer meaningful employee benefits and perks. Besides traditional benefits like robust health, dental, and vision insurance, consider where employees need help. Wellness programs to help employees stay physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally well can help reduce health insurance premiums and absenteeism rates, while boosting productivity. Find out what matters: pet insurance, bonuses, incentives, discounts.
- Provide education benefits. Student loan debt and saving for college keep many employees from reaching other financial goals like retirement. Consider offering a student loan repayment benefit or a college savings plan, and help with future education needs by providing tuition reimbursement. Keeping your workforce educated and aligned with technological shifts—and staffing for evolving organizational needs—means constantly upskilling. Assisting with educational costs makes sense when many still owe on past student loans.
- Value work-life balance. Make sure your employees know you value work-life balance. Support your employees’ life outside work through flexible scheduling, hybrid or remote options, generous paid time off, leave for caregiving, childcare assistance, and focus on productivity rather than hours. Studies have shown employees who are given reasonable workplace flexibility are four times less likely to quit their jobs.
- Encourage mentorship and personal development. Mentorship programs are a great way to connect new employees with other employees who can help them network, learn about diverse areas, and develop their careers. Managers should also meet regularly to discuss the employee’s aspirations, and should be open to encouraging lateral moves if they help employees reach their goals within the organization.
- Focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Promote diversity and equity by providing training, encouraging dialogue, and celebrating diversity through events and recognition. Research shows organizations that promote and support DEI are 2.6 times more likely to increase employee engagement and improve retention.
- Manage for retention. A good manager acts as a coach rather than a boss, creating a team of employees who work together but who are guided as individual players on the team. This philosophy considers employees as essential teammates who are improved as individual “players” with the right advice, support, goals, development, and encouragement.
- Create a positive culture. Share your core values, reward and recognize employees for both their achievements and their efforts, and make sure your workplace celebrates the contributions of diverse team members. Make corporate social responsibility real by working together as a team to give back to your community. In doing this, you’ll grow and learn more about each other.
- Offer opportunities for engagement. Seek honest feedback from employees about your culture, the work environment, and what’s working and what isn’t. This is how improvement happens. Allowing employees to take part in shaping the culture makes them feel more invested in the organization. Forced participation in social activities will backfire, so get employee buy-in when planning events as much as possible.
Reach Out for Help
While these organization-wide strategies can require substantial effort over time to help you make a difference in retaining and engaging employees, the rewards are great. You’ll keep the costs of turnover (and recruitment) down—and enjoy greater morale and productivity with happier, more engaged and experienced employees.
To learn more about how to support your employees with meaningful education benefits like Employer-Assisted Student Loan Repayment and Tuition Reimbursement, contact BenefitEd. We also offer a unique partnership with AllCampus to help you enhance participation and degree completion among those who participate in tuition reimbursement. Contact your BenefitEd representative today to get started.