Ensure your full compensation stack is inclusive. Salary and health insurance are table stakes. Instead, pay attention to how you are filling the variable bucket. If you see low utilization of your perks and benefits, it's time to change up your strategy and try stipends (with 90% utilization!) for better engagement. More engaged employees means happier employees, and happier employees means higher productivity, better quality of work, and less burnout. These things are critical for retaining your talent and running a successful business.
It's well known in the HR industry that a leading reason for the Great Resignation was employees leaving corporations in pursuit of a better work-life balance. Employees want to feel appreciated for their contribution to an organization. The pandemic was a huge wake-up for millions of people who reassessed the quality of their lives and if companies want to reduce employee turnover then they need to review the whole work environment. Leaders can assist by offering more flexibility with work hours for example. Showing empathy for the challenges employees have taking care of kids or loved ones or even finding time to get to a dentist without taking a day of unpaid leave. Introduce hybrid work environments or allow employees to work remotely once a week if your type of industry permits. Focus more on productivity than rigid work hours.
With inflation at an all-time high, volatility in the stock market, fears of a recession, and a historic labor shortage, offering competitive cash compensation is currently paramount in reducing employee turnover. Simply speaking, employees are stressed about cashflow, and opportunities with competitive pay are abundant. If your company cannot keep up, you will bleed talent. When evaluating your compensation program, ask yourself: Are you paying your employees a living wage? What about a competitive wage? If you can\'t afford to offer a competitive wage, are there other benefits or perks (e.g. flexible or remote work, reduced schedule, etc) that could bridge the gap?
Leaders can help reduce employee turnover by living the company culture. Leaders in the company can exhibit collaborative behaviors that inspire others to do the same. This sense of fitting in and being a part of something bigger can attribute to enjoyment in the workplace. Another way leaders can reduce turnover is to focus on employee development. In combination with HR's help, finding out what each employee's career goals are will allow specific plans to be made for employees. This plan can help them achieve their goals and this type of career fulfillment will foster company loyalty and reduce turnover.
Coaching is a competency that is essential for leaders. The research is clear - turnover is most commonly due to the boss, manager, or supervisor. It follows that developing coaching skills and a coaching culture is key to changing outcomes. When a leader learns to coach, they develop their team, empower their team, and engage their team. This will increase job satisfaction and productivity as well as reduce turnover. How specifically does coaching reduce turnover? Instead of telling, micro-managing, demanding, limited or poor communication, with coaching skills the leader will be interested in the people on their team, ask questions, empower, and communicate effectively. Coach training and coaching are a powerful tool. And, research shows, the average return on investment for the organization investing in coaching is 600%. The value is clear.
When an employee is hired they report to one direct supervisor and there is an often overlooked golden opportunity in this scenario. The opportunity is for the supervisor and the employee to set up one on one meetings at the beginning of the employment relationship. As an HR Professional I am keen on ensuring that the employee I assist in hiring set up with a regular cadence of meetings to speak with their supervisor. I have a regular weekly meeting with my supervisor as well. In my opinion, everyone at all levels of the organization should be meeting with their supervisor regularly. This ensures that there is a regular window to time to have a discussion, whatever that discussion may be. In keeping the dialogue open and honest the employee has the chance to share what they are and are not happy about in their current role before they start on the path to disengagement and potential resignation. Nina Pavlichko, SHPR & SHRM-CP Qmerit Electrification LLC
Senior Consultant at The Gallagher Group - Executive Search & Leadership Advisors
Answered 4 years ago
Make no assumptions that you know what it will take to retain your best team mates. The equation of work has changed dramatically post 2020. The drivers for retention today are often different and this is your opportunity to open a candid conversation about retention. These one-on-one sessions will take time and commitment from your leadership team, however, I predict this will yield a return on this investment. Be present, fully ready to listen and hear the requests of your teams. This direct feedback might need a follow-up conversation. This is the important work we need to do now amidst the many uncertainties that still remain. Team building starts one-on-one.
Your HR professionals know why people are leaving. And if they don't, they can tell you what tools need to be put in place - whether it's employee survey tools, workforce analytics, or otherwise - to determine why. The primary reason HR professionals aren't able to make a tangible reduction in turnover is that their input goes unheeded. In countless SWOT analyses I've conducted for organizations, HR is actually willing to surface what the primary root cause of turnover is. And many times both the processes and technology changes to positively impact turnover are then documented for leadership. It's the moment when leaders must both acknowledge and sign-off on those changes when the path towards improvement can break down.
It's important that leaders reframe the responsibility of retention. Retaining great talent is the responsibility of everyone across the organization. However, it is primarily the responsibility of people managers. While recruitment and development are well-known duties of people managers, retention is often that missing link. Reframing retention as a core people manager responsibility mitigates otherwise imprudent decisions to separate and turns managers into advocates for internal mobility as misaligned talent needs to be upskilled and reskilled. Leaders would do well to empower people managers as a part of the solution to retention concerns by reframing the responsibility of retention as primarily theirs.
Investing in leadership training and development to create better bosses is the greatest single way to reduce employee turnover as leaders carry the most influence as to whether staff stays or goes. Improving retention requires efforts to create a better place to work, and company culture is how people are treated within the organization, not what\'s written on Core Values posters on the wall. Companies that are serious about reducing turnover are now ensuring their leaders at every level have been given the proper tools and training to become Retention Champions, those who are magnetic and attract staff to come and stay with them over time.
Employees want to feel seen within their organization. One way to do that is to make sure they feel recognized and appreciated for their day to day efforts at work. Gratitude helps people be more engaged at work which absolutely reduces turnover. Leaders and executives can't take that on alone, so they should empower everyone in the organization with a peer to peer recognition platform. Gratitude and recognition are so important in helping people feel seen, and when team members feel seen they stay at their job longer.
If you have a high level of employee turnover, conducting exit interviews with leaving employees can give you insights into why that is and if there are any trends in why staff are leaving - perhaps stress related to workloads, poor management, or that pay and benefits are not competitive enough. Armed with data, leaders can communicate that they are aware of issues and show how they are working to positively change organisational culture to address areas of concern, showing a commitment to improvement from the top level of the business.
In a hyper competitive labor market, voluntary turnovers that stem from mismatched hires are exponentially more expensive. It\'s time to retire traditional job descriptions that use polished, catch-all narratives and only highlight the positive aspects of the job to attract candidates. The new age of acquiring talent (for retention) warrants the use of Realistic Job Previews in the hiring process to give candidates a 360 view about the role, upfront - with both the opportunities and challenges included - so that they can make an informed decision about their own suitability for the job. Share a recorded "Day in the Life" video, leverage virtual job simulations, and spotlight real, human experiences from current employees - stories about what they are excited about, and challenges or failures that made them or their team closer and stronger. From the very first touch points with candidates, strive for alignment about the day-to-day realities of the job to reduce first-year turnover.
I recently happened to chat to the CEO of a telemedicine company who struggled with retention across the organization. The CEO was frustrated and angry at the situation, at their competitors but also at their employees. "All these companies keep calling up my employees, offering twice our salaries and stealing our talent! What do they have that we don't?" And there it was, the key flaw and mindset shift we had to work on: What do THEY have that we don't? A lightning-fast way to solve this dilemma was simply flipping the question: What do WE have that they don't? Instead of comparison with others, the CEO suddenly reflected upon all the reasons why employees might want to stay. This was the first moment, they were intentional and crystal-clear about it themselves. The only thing left to do was embedding these Top 3 or Top 5 reasons across the employee lifecycle, so that the next time their competitors tried poaching employees, they would confidently decline and know why to stay.
Leaders should monitor the employees to identify toxic employees. These employees cause the most harm to the employee turnover rate as their colleagues prefer quitting and working somewhere else. Leaders should also identify their employees' performance and appreciate good work done; this will help them feel valued and motivated to work. An excellent work-life balance might be the key to good performance and job satisfaction. Leaders offering a good balance between the two help the HR department reduce the employee turnover rate.
Change starts at the top of any organization, and the relationships between leadership and the workforce in general impact how we are able to retain our top performers. Organizational leadership must be able to communicate with empathy, model behaviors that we expect from our employees, and set the tone for a positive and psychologically safe work environment. Empathy is really key to avoiding tone deaf messaging that tends to work against employee engagement. That engagement is what helps us reduce turnover and improve talent attraction.
One way how leaders in an organization can help HR professionals reduce employee turnover is by communicating the organization's vision and goals to employees. This will help employees understand the importance of their work in the organization and be more motivated to stay with the company. Leaders can also provide support to HR professionals in identifying and addressing issues that may be causing employees to leave the organization.
To function optimally, an HR team requires a long lineup of resources, and these resources prove even more crucial when the team is fighting to reduce employee turnover. From employee engagement measures that are put to work in different ways to engaging in activities that help to keep an employee loyal to the organization, the HR team requires resources for each of these essential tasks. The best way for leaders to support their HR personnel and help them overcome employee turnover challenges is to provide them with the resources they need to carry out their activities.
Don't rush the on-boarding process. HR professionals need to be allowed the time to give the proper consideration before promoting a candidate for hiring. If your HR department is rushed to fill seats, odds will be that they will end up hiring candidates that are less than ideal for a role in order to meet their deadlines. Employee's hired in this way are far more likely to quit or be terminated. Provide clear guidelines as to what your looking for in a candidates and allow your HR department the needed time to make sure you're getting quality hires. Quality over quantity.
Conduct exit interviews and encourage interviewees to go into detail about why they’re leaving. A lot of interviewees don’t want to outright say they’re motivation for quitting, out of fear of burning bridges, but this doesn’t benefit anyone. Explain that you’d like to know what the company can do better to maintain their workforce. Once you recognize your responsibility in the resignation, you’re more likely to get an honest answer. Whether you like the response or not use it as an opportunity for change. You may even incentivize some employees to stay.