Employee retention can oftentimes be overlooked, but it is an incredibly important aspect of any company. Losing employees can lead to a drop in productivity, expensive costs, and overall low-spirited morale surrounding the company. In this blog, we will discuss what employee retention is and the methods on how to get employees to stick around.
What is employee retention?
Employee retention is an employer’s ability to keep employees working at their company. While employee turnover is natural for any business, the overall goal is to minimize it and strengthen employee experiences. Following this section, we will talk about the top reasons why employees tend to stay around longer.
How to retain employees?
- Career Development: The main reason why an employee leaves a company is due in part to the lack of vertical movement. Employees want to know that if they work hard enough, they can advance higher in the company. Most of the time turnover happens after work anniversaries, birthdays, or other occasions that make someone reflect on what they have accomplished. During these times, employees are assessing where they are in life and within the company and determine if it is where they want to be.
- To make sure that your employees feel invested in, offer opportunities for professional growth and career development. For employees, this could be anything from continuing education, participating in conferences and workshops, improving technology and systems, or increasing the responsibilities of the job.
- Balanced Workload: Another reason that an employee leaves a company is due to burnout. Employee burnout can happen quickly if they are overworked week in and week out. Overworking can lead to higher stress levels, dissatisfaction towards a job, and will ultimately lead to them “jumping ship.”
- To combat overworked employees, find ways to balance the workload across the team. This could include making sure everyone’s expectations align and regularly meeting with employees to review projects and deadlines.
- Good Company Culture: A big reason for high employee turnover is due to a poor company culture fit. This does not necessarily mean that an employee does not fit with your company, it means that your company does not fit with its employees. If you want the most success from your employees, they have to feel welcomed and as much as part of the team as the CEO. To establish a good company culture, we recommend sharing company values, providing good leadership, cultivating strong co-worker relationships, giving recognition for valuable work, encouraging professional growth, and asking for regular feedback.
- Establishing Internal Marketing: When you think of marketing, you are probably thinking about reaching an audience outside of your company. But actually, that is not always the case. Marketing can be done internally, and it can be extremely beneficial for the retention of your employees.
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- Internal marketing is the promotion of the company’s mission, values, goals, products, and services to its own employees. With this strategy, companies are able to build better relationships with their employees and overall create a more positive employee experience. And we all know, a positive employee experience leads to a longer retention period.
Here are some examples of internal marketing to implement in your company:
- – Create a group email or text message. This makes it easy to reach your employees and for your employees easy to reach you.
- – Share your employees’ accomplishments on your social platforms. It is a great way to recognize their hard work and to build brand awareness at the same time.
- – Make an employee newsletter. An employee newsletter is perfect for highlighting and connecting employees across departments. Possible content that you could include: work updates, employee profiles, milestones and anniversaries, upcoming events, and team highlights.
- – Host employee social events. Just like how a client event cultivates relationships so will an employee event. This could be anything from hosting team lunches to holiday parties for your employees.
Closing thoughts on employee retention
Employee retention is key to any successful business. While we are not HR experts, we do know that employer branding, recruitment marketing, and internal marketing can pay off in all the best ways. Visit Transformation Marketing’s website to see how we can help you strengthen your brand and grow your business the right way.