Your staff should never resemble a game of musical chairs, constantly losing players one by one. Vanderbloemen knows how all-consuming a search process can be to replace an employee. But the best recruiting strategy starts before the search starts – by focusing on retention. Here are 5 ways to increase your retention and keep all your players in the game.
1. Generational Differences
Work motivations can change drastically with generations, depending on their ages, phases of life, and values. Recognizing diverse perspectives, preferences, and work styles fosters a workplace where each generation feels valued. Your role is to provide flexibility for these differences and to provide experiences that everyone can enjoy together. When you consider generational differences and care for different perspectives, you boost morale and cohesion, and ultimately, your staff sticks around for longer.
2. Flexibility
Current and potential employees alike (after experiencing new work-from-home conditions in the pandemic) know that more flexibility is possible, and they understand their personal limits better. Workplace flexibility is one lesson we all learned from the pandemic that is likely to stick around. One productive way to implement flexibility is to choose times of the week, month, or year to motivate employees to reach goals and reward them with work-from-home days.
3. Communication and Clarity
It has never been more important to communicate your mission well and to avidly encourage the people making that mission a reality. As a delegator and overseer, you have the responsibility to communicate how each person’s job specifically contributes to the overall mission. Continually remind them with a smile that their work is important.
4. Compensation
Understanding compensation needs based on industry standards, updated compensation data, and cost of living is critical for both hiring and retaining the best fits for your team’s needs. Show your employees you value their loyalty by giving regular raises. This will also help account for the fact that other, higher-paying jobs will become available. You don’t want to be a mere stepping stone from their last job to the next. Show them that this is a place they can afford to stay.
5. Have Fun
This one is simple. It’s fun to have fun at work. Fun prevents burnout, boredom, and negative staff culture – three major push factors that cause employees to quit. If this seems daunting or impossible to you, delegate the fun to someone with an outgoing, organized personality. Fun comes out of genuine excitement to work together.
When you focus on these 5 approaches to retention, you will reap the benefits of a joyful staff and minimize costly turnover. As you strengthen your team’s ability to accomplish each of these values, you will find that your employees will rave about how they love their jobs.
