Staff Retention Strategies

If you are not doing all you can to keep your staff happy and engaged, you may be at risk of losing your most productive workers to your competition.

You do not need to spend a lot of money to put a staff retention strategy in place. Here are a few things that can help you keep your staff happy.

• A well-defined career path – Most employees want to progress in their careers and like to know that there are opportunities available within their workplace to do so. Have discussions with your team about their professional goals and aspirations and how they can achieve them within your organisation. Offer mentoring and training programmes.
• Acknowledgement - Make an effort to acknowledge staff achievements and hard work. Most staff are more engaged and have a stronger feeling of satisfaction in their work if they feel that managers appreciate their contribution to the workplace.
• Trust – It can be difficult to be productive when someone is breathing down your neck while you are trying to go about your duties. Most employees like to feel that they can be trusted and relied upon to complete their work efficiently without being micro managed.
• Flexible work environment – Flexible work agreements are one of the most desirable elements of a work environment for staff. Giving your staff the opportunity to attend their children’s school activities or medical emergencies can make a big difference to an employee’s happiness within their job. Helping your staff maintain a healthy work and personal life balance can really increase loyalty to your company.
• Ethics – Most people would prefer to work for a company that they believe is good. It can be beneficial to promote ethics when interacting with customers and employees. Ensure your workplace encourages fairness and diversity.
• Communication – Well defined communication is one of the most important factors of retaining staff. Most staff liked to know what is expected of them and to have clear a clear job description or role within the company. Keep employees up to date when it comes to developments within the organisation. People feel more involved and part of the organisation when they are kept in the loop. Encourage employee feedback and ideas. When staff are involved with projects from the beginning they are more likely to feel connected to the outcome. Make sure to address interpersonal problems among staff members as soon as possible.

By using some of these strategies you can help encourage employee motivation and loyalty and lower the likelihood of losing staff to your competition.

The Importance of Staff Retention

Many companies are now beginning to view employee retention as a critical issue. High Employee turnover increases expenses and can also have negative effects on company morale.

Implementing strategies devised to retain good workers can help counterbalance replacement costs and reduce the indirect costs associated with high staff turnover such as lost clients and loss of morale.

Employee retention has become an important topic for many reasons.

These include:

• Social media networking tools such as LinkedIn make it easy to observe new job opportunities or get poached by another company
• Costs associated with hiring new staff, advertising, interviewing and hiring etc.
• Training new staff
• Loss of productivity. It can take up to 2 years for a new staff member to reach the same productivity levels as existing staff members
• Loss of engagement. Retained employees who see a high turnover often get disheartened and lose engagement

The longer staff stay with an organisation, the more productive they get .They get to know the systems, products and learn how to work together as a team.

Many high performing companies have loyal employees and each company has its own strategies for retaining their employees.

Some of the interesting things to consider:

• Compensation is a factor but does not play as big a role as you would think. Over-compensation will not offset a poor work environment
• Job fit is significantly important. Hiring the right people for the right positions by realistically advertising job positions will save you a lot of trouble in the long run. If you oversell a job you can suffer from high staff turnover. Effective retention strategies often begin during the employee recruitment process. Employees are more inclined to remain with a company that fulfils the promises made when their employment offer was extended. Companies that provide a realistic view of their corporate environment, advancement opportunities and job expectations to new hires can positively influence employee retention
• The work environment and culture matter. Staff want to feel appreciated, comfortable and included in their place of work. Employees that enjoy what they do and the atmosphere in which they work are more likely to remain employed with their company

Implementing an employee retention program is an effective way of making sure key workers remain employed while maintaining job performance and productivity.


In the end the most prosperous organisations are those that respect their employees and invest in building an engaged work place environment.

Hiring Wisdom: Top 10 Ways to Guarantee Your Best People Will Quit

Do you have an up to date Retention Program for you staff? 
What about your staff induction program - is it conveying the right message to your new staff members? 
If you want to retain your best staff, these are things to consider. 
For more, read this article from TLNT :
http://www.tlnt.com/2013/04/08/hiring-wisdom-top-10-ways-to-guarantee-your-best-people-will-quit/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tlnt+%28TLNT%3A+The+Business+of+HR%29

Managing High employee sick leave

Real Life Case Study - Managing High Employee Sick Leave

In our latest December newsletter we were excited to add a new section -  a real life case study of an End2end Business Solutions success story.

Managing High employee sick leave

I am currently working with a client who has an employee who is constantly taking sick leave and obtaining doctors certificates.  The employee is part of an administrative team who all share the business' administrative tasks.  In addition to having high sick leave, the employee isn’t a team player, only completes the bare minimum of work and the work is of poor quality.  Left unchecked, this has caused angst and low morale with the other workers.    Initially I thought this was a training issue, however, I decided to investigate the sick leave records to determine if I could find a pattern.   Sure enough, this part-time employee would fall sick on the last 2 days of a period, often just before long weekends or end of month when it was busy, creating a week's leave regularly for themselves. 

My next step was to organise a meeting with the employee to present my findings and gain input from them on how this situation could be satisfactorily resolved, with the ultimate aim of the employee taking ownership of the medical condition instead of making it a problem for the employer.   In this meeting I found that the employee needed to work, but was not completely happy in this job. 

The solution has been that the employee will be returning to the doctor to have the medical condition managed properly and action taken.  The worker is also working to make up for time lost and help their fellow team members.  The final step will be to get the employee feeling engaged as part of the team and not as though it is a chore to be at the employer.   Regular communication with this employee has helped in letting the employee know that someone is aware and is ready to help. 

As an employer, don’t leave high sick leave unchecked, there may not always be a pattern, however, it is important to address it with the employee by offering to help solve the issue they may have, and getting the employee to take ownership of the problem.   If it is an attitude problem that is causing the high absence level, work to find out what the underlying issue is and take steps to re-engage the employee.
 

How to retain employees and enhance job enrichment

The Insync Surveys 2012 Retention Review into why employees resign surveyed more than 11,000 employees from 40 Australian organisations over a four and a half year period, focusing on those who left their job between January 2011 and April 2012. It found that lack of job enrichment is the leading cause of staff turnover.

The research found that employees leave an organization or business:

• primarily due to the job itself, and not because of pay or relationships with managers or peers, or
• because of one or more factors, such as job enrichment, interpersonal, structural, home life, & environmental.

                               

The average Australian turnover rate of 18 per cent costs organisations with 100 employees around $1 million every year but they could save around $280,000 annually, by reducing turnover by just five per cent.

To improve your chances of retaining your employees and enhance job enrichment, employers can:

• Provide adequate resources for each employee to perform well. ie IT, communication technology, and personnel training and development.
• Create a supportive corporate culture. This includes peer support networks, supportive management, have a culture that fosters the ability for people to openly share their knowledge
• Ensure a free flow of information, and try to eliminate secrecy.
• Provide enough freedom to facilitate job excellence. Encourage and reward employee initiative by providing adequate recognition, appreciation, and other motivators.
• Provide professional development and skill improvement opportunities. This could include paid education at universities or on the job training.
• Provide job variety. This can be done by job sharing or job rotation programmes.
• Offer meaningful work as part of each role and link each role to the success of the organisation
• Be flexible in how, when and where people can complete their work.
• Have career development plans for your staff
• Ensure that new employees are offered sufficient training and do not overload them with a full workload the minute they walk in the door.

There are also other steps an organisation can take to boost retention and reduce staff turnover such as:

• Ensure that you are measuring turnover, and understanding whether it is the high performers who are departing, or the poor performers.   
• Create enriching and meaningful jobs – this allows organisations to match staff with the right job for their skills and interests, thus reducing turnover
• Be flexible – be accommodating of changing life circumstances - This is the second biggest contributor to staff turnover. Be creative in the use of both short and long-term flexible work arrangements.
• Put a value on transparency – trust and honesty are important in a team.
• Impartiality is also essential to employee retention. Everyone must believe they all have the same chance and every decision must be unbiased.
• Recognise performance – and offer rewards that are not just contingent on a behaviour or result. Think outside the square and consider other types of rewards – access rewards such as discounted insurance or mobile phone packages.
• Where possible, empower staff members to make decisions and take ownership of what they do.
• Conducting exit interviews and regular staff surveys, seeking informal feedback from managers and establishing a retention strategy.

 Reducing staff turnover should not be considered solely a HR issue, all areas and levels of management should give this attention in order to boost employee retention and ultimately help the bottom line of your business. Giving due attention to all areas of the hiring & training process,  actively working to maintain and improve staff morale and having an effective employee retention will go a long way in preventing a high employee turnover.

For help with retention programs, performance reviews, or any staffing issues, please contact Annette at End2End Business Solutions for a customised solution.

To Attract and Retain Gen Y Workers

It is projected that by 2020, workers born between 1980-1995 will make up approx, 40% of the workforce.

So, do you have a retention strategy for your young, Gen Y staff?

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can simply pay them more, and they will stay.

Organizations should consider shifting their mindset from permanent work to projects to give them the edge in attracting and retaining Gen Y workers. Money is rarely enough to keep employees on board and engaged.

To keep your young workers, companies should start thinking about lifestyle rather than salary, and offering these young Gen Y workers a job that makes them feel like they're making a difference in the world. Gen Y employees need to feel they are learning, and they especially appreciate being coached. That means employers and managers need to be competent in coaching techniques. Gen Y people welcome new challenges and a manageable degree of risk. If they are given an opportunity to take on a new challenge they see this as a vote of confidence in their abilities.Most importantly, they should be able to obtain a sense of accomplishment and forward momentum from their role and career, as Gen Y see accomplishments as the steppingstones to success. Without this, Gen-Yers feel as though they’re spinning their wheels.