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Introduction:
The long-running talent struggle for firms has only been made worse by the advent of virtual and hybrid workplaces. This modern and extensively flexible work model along with rapidly advancing technology has increased the allowance of mobility for the workforce. This in turn has contributed to a myriad of opportunities and ease for switching jobs. Further, the changing expectations of new generations with greater emphasis on maximizing autonomy and flexibility, as well as prioritizing balancing of personal and professional lives have escalated the problem.
While businesses put a lot more effort into finding good talent, it would be foolish to ignore the enormous expense of employee turnover. A report by SHRM says that it typically costs a business six to nine months' worth of salary to replace a paid employee. This exorbitant value includes funds used for hiring and onboarding as well as the resultant costs of lost morale, productivity and engagement.
Although this is a prevailing issue, every organization struggles to find the solution while some still don't seem to get how critical it is to deal head-on with it. This can be due to the ambiguity surrounding both its impact and potential solutions. As such every organization needs to evaluate its existing condition in light of various data points pertaining to staff retention and develop a unique, tailored strategy for it. This takes a lot of resources and it is challenging to put together a plan of this nature. Let us dive into the depth of this problem and look at some insightful solutions that a corporation can adopt in order to deal with it successfully.
Factors Affecting the Employee Retention Score
Training and Career Development:
Learning and development (L&D) initiatives can be a valuable aspect of your employee value proposition. Today’s employees are very much motivated by self development and career progression initiatives. In fact, one of the top advantages sought by employees of the new generation is learning and skill development. Also, they are more likely to stick with you if you show them that you respect their growth and development. According to a 2021 Gallup survey conducted on behalf of Amazon, for young adults aged 18 to 24 who are just entering the workforce, upskilling is deemed the third most important benefit when evaluating a new job.
Learning and development activities can help energize bored, going-through-the-motions employees, increase the engagement levels and also enforces your workforce to question their next steps and career milestones. Further, a recent LinkedIn Learning report showed that 94 percent of employees would stay at an organization longer if it invested in their learning and career development. Meanwhile, they are actively improving the skills that help the company innovate and grow. It’s a virtuous loop that helps improve employee retention and leads to a more successful business overall.
💡 Analyze the needs: An important step in crafting the training and development programme for employees is the individual-level training needs analysis using data sources such as performance appraisals, assessment of employee skills, interviews, questionnaires, employee inputs and customer surveys to determine the training needs of the employee. A good Learning Management System can help in the entire processing of L&D in an organization.
💡 Add Opportunities for Personal Growth: A successful learning and development program shouldn't be focused solely on the requirements of the company; instead, it should offer opportunities for personal growth as well. For example, if an organization encourages its workforce to learn a new language or enhance their public speaking skills even if these skills aren't directly applicable to their jobs, it will truly increase the loyalty across its employees. Also, many employees want to continue their education and also, to share ideas with colleagues. The emerging way of social learning enables them to do both, creating stronger bonds with each other at the same time.
💡 Have Solid Onboarding Plan: Onboarding is the first opportunity and perhaps the best one to embed and immerse the employees into your culture. Also, giving them the basic training to use the tools and technologies they will require to perform their jobs will boost their confidence and engagement levels.
💡 Market your Learning Programme: Making sure your business has an effective communication strategy in place to inform employees about your learning and development opportunities is also crucial. Appoint ambassadors and form groups that will help spread the word about the program among participants while giving program administrators a feedback loop as well.
💡 Customize Training: The freedom to choose the kind of training that makes sense for their role and professional development goes a long way in establishing loyalties and engagement. Match the desired training needs and the preferred learning style of an employee to offer him a customized learning opportunity.
Flexibility and Work-Life Balance:
Modern workers are intelligent. They are driven to succeed in all areas of their lives and are aware of the best times, places, and environments for productivity. According to a Forbes report, millennials are more interested in finding a career path that supports their lifestyle. Hence, more of them are demanding flexibility today. For different people, flexibility could take different shapes. While some like to schedule their work hours to avoid traffic, others want some lone focus days for their work projects, and some prefer to plan their time around their family's activities.
Employees who have some degree of flexibility in their work schedules find it simpler to manage their non-work-related obligations and keep a healthy work-life balance. And when it is easy for them to deal with pressures on the homefront, they naturally become more productive on the job and less inclined to pursue a new opportunity to switch companies. Thus, when it comes to flexibility, it is all about making the lifestyle of your employees easy and less stressful.
💡 Alternative work options: Any scheduling arrangement that differs from the typical office schedule of a set time in-office work-week from Monday through Friday is a good way to support flexibility. Therefore, offering them a combination of Work From Home (WFH), remote or hybrid kind of work models makes good sense. 💡 Flextime: Apart from workstyle options, giving them some control over the hours they work and when they would like to work helps them maintain a healthy work-life balance. Organizations which need employees to be on job for certain hours or a few fixed hours can regulate such hours by including requirements for ‘certain minimum hours required’ or ‘timings for core work hours’ in their flextime policy. 💡 Respect Time Off: Ensuring policies for illnesses, personal time and vacation leaves is a good way to show that you care for the wellbeing of your employees. Allow paid leave and encourage them to take a minimum number of leaves to prevent burnout and pave way for a healthy lifestyle. This can be done by putting a limit on leaves that can be carried forward to another annual year. The intention is to communicate to your staff that you anticipate them to spend time with their family. Also, establishing a clear company-wide expectation that there should be no work related communications when employees are on leaves or during non working hours is important. You could ask them to share their calendar with you because having flexible hours makes practice of this protocol challenging sometimes. 💡 Offer Special Facilities for Parents: Having childcare solutions on-site can be very advantageous to the parents in your staff. The presence of day-care can help ease their concerns. Facilitate breast-feeding for new mothers on staff by providing separate break rooms. Also, providing for parental leaves is an alluring and meaningful benefit. Guaranteeing that women are not discriminated against, based on pregnancy, motherhood or family responsibilities, in relation to employment conditions, wages or career opportunities will increase their workplace satisfaction. Organizing special awareness sessions for childhood development or other parental related topics can also help. 💡 Control the allocation of work: It's important to balance employees' work schedules to prevent overwork, especially in busy seasons. Offering them compensatory offs or overtime pay is a good way to show that you recognize their efforts, but it is far more advantageous to regulate the work hours in order to preserve a healthy work-life balance. Understanding how much each person, individually and collectively, can handle is crucial before allocating work. Train managers to make sure they assign tasks fairly and set realistic deadlines.
Work Environment and Culture:
Work environment is significantly related to employee retention. The work environment of an organization includes many factors but there are few major aspects of it that significantly and directly impact on employee retention such as:
The Co-Worker and Supervisor/Manager Support
Responsibilities and the Work Itself
Autonomy or Control over Performance of their Role
Organizational Culture
The Physical Environment in which they Operate
The most significant factor for variance in an employee’s engagement levels at an organization is his manager. No matter how fantastic a job and compensation may be, if there is a poor relationship between the employee and his manager, he will leave the organization. A manager designs their job, assigns them tasks, mentors them, and steps in to save them in any difficult situations. As such, based on their actions or inaction, managers have a huge potential to negatively impact their morale, drive, and productivity. Gallup's extensive 2015 survey revealed that one in two had left their job to get away from their manager to improve their overall life at some point in their career.
Most full time workers spend a major amount of time with their coworkers and hence positive relationships with them also impacts retention and employees’ commitment towards the organization. When they have coworkers that support, encourage and applaud their accomplishments they tend to feel greater satisfaction and enjoy their work. At work, peers can actually serve as a motivating force for good. According to a TINYpulse survey on employee engagement, peers and camaraderie are the major causes of employees going above and beyond in performing their roles.
💡Train Managers: Training managers for adopting practices that boosts retention is a must considering the role they play in an employee’s work life. Make them realize the importance of regular one-on-ones with their team members and take their feedback as well as address their needs actively. Being proactive helps and if the managers learn to take cues while conversing with their team members and take steps to address them, it can significantly increase the engagement and retention. 💡Boost Team Building: Organizing team building activities to build relationships with colleagues helps an employee to feel deeply connected with his workplace. Today’s working generation also expects to learn from their teammates and so it is necessary to create and support a learning environment all throughout the organization.
When it comes to feeling happy at a workplace, an employee's responsibilities and the nature of his work matter a lot. He should find his work immersive, engaging and challenging enough. Designing the job in such a way is a challenging task but constant efforts should be made in this aspect. Also, every employee expects autonomy and freedom to perform his role and responsibilities.
💡 Hire Strategically and Create a Realistic Job Preview: It is important to invest in the right personnel from the beginning. Give a clear brief of your expectations for the position and create a realistic preview of job duties to prevent a mismatch between employee skill sets and required job skills. During the interview process, be aware of any potential cultural mismatches through appropriate evaluations.
💡 Using Socialization to Improve New Hire Retention: Socialization with new teammates and colleagues helps reduce new hires anxiety, support rapport building and easing in the organization’s environment.
💡 Meet Expectations: When an organization hires an individual, he/she has certain expectations especially with respect to his job role and responsibilities. Being clear on what they are expecting and why they left their previous organization, at the time of hiring, is important so that you can evaluate whether the job is a fit for them and also what efforts or thoughts you would need to put while designing his job tasks. 💡Give Autonomy: Providing employees with adequate autonomy and independence in their work contributes to engagement and trust-building. If you need to supervise, a smart method to do so would be to ask the person what they think and how they want to go about building the solution. Then, if necessary, you may offer comments or direction. 💡Prioritize recognition: According to a new Gallup/Workhuman survey, companies that make employee recognition a priority have workers who are 56% less likely to be looking for a new job, and 73% less likely to feel burned out when recognition is offered. Following efforts can be made to support recognition:
Train the managers for recognition of their team members. For instance, telling the person the specific things they did, how you experienced it, the impact it had on team members and the organization and not just that they did a good job. People are more inclined to stay when they feel valued and are aware of the impact they make.
Make recognition part of your culture. Allocate budget for recognition programmes and make award functions a huge deal apart from publicly praising the star performers regularly.
Devise a good appraisal system and make a company-wide awareness of its importance and seriousness. Imparting training to the managers also helps here.
Negative or toxic workplace environments can result in disgruntled or disengaged employees, poor quality work, dissatisfied clients, and excessive staff turnover. Every aspect of an organization's environment is governed by its organizational culture. Your workplace culture codifies what it’s like for employees to work there. It includes the mission and objectives along with values, leadership and employee expectations, structured performance management and overall engagement levels. In the U.S. 74% of respondents in a Glassdoor multi-country survey said they would look elsewhere for work if their company culture were to deteriorate.
Also, a solid plan for diversity and inclusion can assist businesses in attracting top talent and fostering creative solutions. By fostering an inclusive environment and a sense of community while respecting diversity within your business, a strong organizational culture can aid in reducing turnover. The rates of employee retention and turnover can ultimately suffer if your employees feel they must conceal or mask fundamental aspects of who they are at work.
💡 Include diversity training: Giving staff diversity and inclusion training isn't simply a formality; it's also about fostering inclusive workplaces, helping people overcome unconscious biases, and letting people know that the organization values diversity. To make it habitual behavior, HRs should cover subjects like cultural competency, inclusivity, bias awareness, anti-discrimination law, managing difficult conversations with diverse populations (including race/ethnicity, gender identity/expression), dealing with microaggressions or unconscious biases, and more. 💡 Respect all cultures: Introduce a policy for honoring a variety of cultural and religious practices.You can do this by focusing on holidays and celebrations. Introducing optional leaves on holidays pertaining to different cultures will help employees manage their leaves according to their cultural and religious attachments. 💡 Foster culture through leadership: Leadership can build and solidify culture by encouraging activities that fosters it and adopting a lead-by-example working style. Empathetic leadership is valued greatly by today’s workforce. A leader should create a stable work environment by being a trustworthy leader, defining expectations, establishing personal rules, being upfront and open about the mistakes he makes, explaining inconsistencies, encouraging feedback and inputs from employees. 💡 Care about Physical & Mental Well being: Offering benefits related to physical health such as gym facilities or memberships, health insurance or doctor assistance at the office premises promotes physical health of employees. But workers today are also seeking employers who care about their employees' mental well-being and invest in training, education, benefits and programs that connect employees with treatment options and mental health care providers. 💡 Approachable HRs/Leverage employee feedback: It is essential to have an easily accessible HR department for handling employee grievances and promoting a culture of feedback. Utilize exit interviews to get first hand feedback from departing workers. Inquire about their motivations for leaving and any potential improvements.
💡 Give them Opportunities to make Social Impact: The youth of today desire the ability to influence society. Give them a chance to do so by organizing charitable events or any social programme for giving back to the society. Organizing such programs on a companywide level will also give them opportunities to form social bonds across teams.
Efforts for retaining Top Talent:
There is always some unavoidable turnover but the attrition of top performers and good talent is more painful for the company. Attrition rates depend on the efforts put by the company for retaining such valuable employees. Internal identification of top performers is therefore necessary not only in order to make special efforts in retaining them but also preparing and grooming them for succession.
💡 Identifying Top Talent: The first step towards retaining top talent is to identify them. Managers can be trained in such endeavors. For instance, while it is relatively easy to identify the one performing well and technically strong at executions and handling projects, it can be difficult to know which employees can be termed as catalysts and potential leaders for filling up the future leadership and top roles. Reflect, analyze and pinpoint the characteristics that are vital to your organization’s success. Identifying the characteristics that can help you in determining your top talent is a good way to proceed. Further, it is also important to decide and select evaluation methods for measuring employee performance based on these characteristics. 💡 Give them Growth Opportunities: Top performers are also the quickest to get disengaged therefore challenging their capabilities and helping them to reach their potential is important. Give them several opportunities and aid for advancing their careers. Also, being clear about how you see their growth path within the company matters a lot. Encourage managers to invest in crafting their growth plans and work along them in this endeavor. 💡 Encouraging Internal Hiring: The key is to make opportunities transparent to employees and allow for agile matching of talent supply and demand internally. This empowers employees to drive their career development within the company. 💡 Recognition in terms of Rewards, Appraisal and Benefits: Even if the majority of your top achievers may be self-driven, recognition has just as much value for them as it does for everyone else. Keep your pay and benefits to the industry levels and going beyond for your star performers can be even more helpful. Although this might be seen as imparity in pay sometimes, it can be solved by establishing different salary bands for different levels. Timely promotions to the deserved goes a long way in retaining employees. 💡 Giving them Mentoring and Knowledge sharing Opportunities: High performers are also always eager to share their knowledge. Give them a stage for such knowledge sharing and also ample coaching and mentoring opportunities. This also increases learning and motivations amongst other team members.
Meaningful Benefits:
Employees seek a comprehensive benefits package that goes above and beyond a paycheck, allowing them to successfully juggle their demanding personal and professional commitments while yet feeling appreciated and valued by their employer. You must invest in customized benefits - the proper kind of perks that your employees will understand and value - if you want to win the talent battle and reduce attrition. Instead of offering employees one-size-fits-all plans that are either overly generous or too restrictive, this approach will help supply them with benefits they will actually use.
💡 Offer competitive pay and meaningful benefits: Keep track of what your competitors are paying. If you can’t lead the market with respect to compensation and rewards, offer them a competitive pay and devise a customized benefits package outside the box. Start by investing in comprehensive surveys on employee benefits to identify what perks competitors are offering, what benefits employees will actually find beneficial and how much you can include according to your budget. 💡 Explicitly link rewards to retention: Tying up benefits with retention and rewarding a long stay with the company shows that you value loyalty of employees (offering retention bonuses or linking years of service to employee stock options or defined benefit plan payouts).
Conclusion:
Employee retention is not only an important HR strategy, but it also has an effect on the business side. Lack of a strong employee retention and turnover reduction plan may lead to some seriously bottomline affecting consequences including lost productivity and knowledge, negative effects on customer and employee experiences, lower morale, and a weaker corporate culture, in addition to the direct costs associated with recruiting, onboarding, and training replacements. Thus, although implementing the strategies, policies, and procedures necessary to keep their finest and brightest employees takes a lot of work, oversight, and targeted investments, it pays off for firms that do so. An efficient staff retention strategy that increases the attractiveness and significance of your employee value proposition (EVP) therefore must be prioritized to ensure an overall organizational success!
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