Oct 04 2020
Keeping your employees happy and engaged is crucial to the success of your organization. A high employee turnover rate will lead to low collective employee morale, causing an increase in company expenses.
Morale has a tendency to be contagious within the workplace. If you want to foster an environment that attracts strong workers, you need to continuously think about your retention strategies. Whether your employee turnover rate is high or low, there is always room for improvement within your culture.
Keep reading for three actionable tips to help improve your employee retention.
Set Expectations
When building an employee retention program, it’s imperative to think critically about your first impression with prospective candidates. That’s right—employee retention begins even before a potential employee has applied to work at your organization! Be sure to take extra care when writing the duties and responsbilites in the job descriptions in order to set accurate expectations with your future employees.
There’s nothing worse than starting a new job only to find out that your day-to-day is nothing like you expected. That’s why it’s absolutely vital to be as honest and exhaustive as possible when writing a job req. When you set accurate expectations with prospective employees you’re much more likely to retain them once they’ve signed on to work at your company.
Onboard with Intent
A lackluster onboarding process fosters a foundation of negativity for new workers. A survey conducted by SHRM of 350 HR leaders in the U.S. found organizations are not effectively onboarding their new hires at 76% of respondents’ workplaces. Poor or absent onboarding processes lead to lower productivity, higher employee turnover, and lower employee engagement.
Onboarding should begin as soon as a candidate accepts the position—sending them a congratulatory note can go a long way! The next step is to personalize onboarding as much as possible, while still taking into consideration how to scale the process.
One way to do this is by having a question in the interview process that gives you a window into the candidate’s interests (e.g., favorite restaurant, sports team, etc.). Then on their first day, you can send them a gift or even a GIF that relates back to their pastimes. Just showing that you remember something personal about the new employee can set your onboarding process apart. A strong onboarding program is key to improving your organization’s employee retention.
Engage with Your Team
Understanding the underlying causes of employee turnover is vital when thinking about employee retention.
Employee pulse surveys are a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of company morale, allowing you to address and mitigate issues as they arise. You won’t always receive actionable feedback from these surveys, but your employees will appreciate the check-in—sometimes workers just want their voices heard.
A great tool to check out is Lattice. Their product makes it easy to create and distribute frequent employee pulse surveys.
We hope these three actionable tips help kick start your employee retention strategy!
