Summary:
7 Employee Retention Strategies to Help Reduce Staff Turnover
Why is staff retention especially important now?
What are the leading causes of high employee turnover?
7 innovative employee retention strategies
7 Employee Retention Strategies to Help Reduce Staff Turnover
Is your organisation seeing a higher than expected employee turnover rate? You’re not alone.
Following the pandemic, a 2021 study conducted by Randstad UK found that a quarter of all British workers were considering leaving their jobs within three to six months—and the ‘Great Resignation’ is set to continue…
Why is staff retention especially important now?
According to the results of a PwC survey released in May 2022, almost a fifth of UK workers are expecting to quit their jobs in the next 12 months. This is in addition to 16% planning on leaving the workforce temporarily or permanently.
With this in mind, organisations need to be doing everything they can to maximise employee retention.
Following the release of the survey, Kevin Ellis, chairman and senior partner at PwC UK said: “The economic outlook may be uncertain but it would be premature to call the end of the Great Resignation.
"Highly skilled workers are in hot demand and employers can't be complacent.”
What are the leading causes of high employee turnover?
There are a number of potential causes behind high employee turnover, but in the next 12 months financial pressure is likely to be key.
The PwC survey found that 27% of UK workers are planning to ask their employer for a raise in the next 12 months. If that request is denied, will those workers look elsewhere? Note that Millennial and Gen Z employees are most likely to ask for a pay increase or promotion—and they’re also most likely to switch employers.
Aside from salary-based motivations for leaving a job, other major causes of staff turnover include:
- A lack of flexible working arrangements, with 80% of employees saying they’d stay in a job longer if these were offered. Indeed, a majority of respondents (59%) to the PwC survey stated their preference would be to work full time or mostly remote 12 months from now.
- Weak onboarding processes have a big impact on retention. In fact, a strong onboarding process improves employee retention by a massive 82%.
- A lack of recognition will also lead to an employee considering their options earlier. A SurveyMonkey study found that 63% of employees who are ‘usually’ or ‘always’ recognised are ‘very unlikely’ to switch jobs in the next 3-6 months.
7 innovative employee retention strategies
Want to improve staff retention within your organisation? Consider implementing these seven employee retention strategies.
1. Assess your company culture
Culture plays a significant role in job satisfaction and enjoyment, and it impacts every aspect of your business. It refers to the attitudes and behaviours of both employees and the organisation, and is shown through how people interact with each other, their values and decision-making. Culture is made up of many elements, including the working environment, company mission and goals, leadership style and ethics.
The best performing organisations don’t just implement ‘best practices’—they think about how a concept or programme will apply to their unique culture and values. This is especially true for your employee retention strategies.
Company culture is central to maximising employee engagement, and this has a big impact on retention. In fact, unengaged and dissatisfied employees will cost an organisation an additional £3,000 in recruitment, on average.
Want to find out more about cultivating an awesome company culture and employee value proposition? Download our free whitepaper.
2. Ask your employees about their concerns
Stop trying to guess why your employees are leaving and ask them. This should be a routine element of one-to-ones anyway, but it would also be worth sending an anonymous survey round the organisation. This will be most likely to secure open and honest answers from your staff.
However, once you’ve got the responses make sure you act on them. Workers who feel ignored by management are twice as likely to become actively disengaged, so don’t make the mistake of asking your workforce for their opinion only to disregard it.
3. Review your hiring strategy
We already touched on the impact of your organisation’s onboarding process when it comes to retention, but if you’re seeing a high number of employees leaving the organisation, it might also be because you didn’t hire the right people to begin with.
During the interview process make sure you’re not just assessing whether the candidate has the right skills, but whether or not they’re a good fit for the organisation.
Regularly review your interview process too. This will help you identify issues that are leading to poor hires.
4 .Review employee remuneration packages
Are you offering a compensation and rewards package that’s competitive with other organisations in the sector?
You also need to consider the employee’s specific value. Their remuneration package might be broadly in line with the industry average for the role, but what additional value do they bring? How have they performed during their time with the organisation? You won’t be able to retain your best talent if you don’t recognise it in their compensation.
A BDO UK study found that knowing the remuneration decision process is fair also increases employee satisfaction.
5. Analyse workloads
If an employee’s workload is too much they’re likely to become stressed and overwhelmed, and this leads to two key problems: reduced productivity and burnout.
While small amounts of stress can be useful in helping us get through challenging situations, chronic stress reduces productivity, increases fatigue and impacts decision making.
What’s more, 95% of HR leaders surveyed by Kronos identified burnout as one of the biggest challenges for maintaining strong retention rates.
Make sure managers are frequently reviewing workloads and ensuring jobs are split evenly between team members, as well as making sure the right team members are working on things that suit their skill sets and experience.
6. Encourage progression and give praise for hard work
Your employees want to know their career will head in the right direction if they stay with your organisation. A clear progression path is essential for job satisfaction, as well as an increased expectation of satisfaction in the future.
Praise and recognition for a job well done is equally important, with research finding a ‘strong relationship’ between recognition and employee happiness.
The presence of a recognition programme has been shown to reduce voluntary staff churn by 31%—but what could your recognition programme include?
- A recognition prepaid card—reloadable cards that can be topped up and used anywhere by employees is a great way of saying thanks for a job well done because it empowers the staff member to spend their reward wherever suits them.
- Employee celebration packages—whether you’re looking to celebrate great performance, long service or specific team achievements, an effective recognition programme and strategy will include everything you need to reward success and encourage it moving forward.
- Employee gift cards and eVouchers—these rewards make it easy to recognise success instantly. Sodexo Engage have the widest and best choice of eVouchers and gift cards in the business, and they’re perfect for recognising a sales rep for hitting their targets, an on-the-spot reward for customer service excellence, birthday celebration or long service award.
7. Implement a benefit and wellbeing programme
Employers and employees alike recognise the importance of prioritising wellbeing in the workplace, but what do you mean by ‘wellbeing’?
For us, wellbeing is made up of three pillars: physical, emotional and financial.
To ensure you’re supporting all three of these pillars, the best strategy is to implement an employee benefits and wellbeing programme. This doesn’t just include rewards for a job well done, but also benefits for simply being an employee of your organisation. This includes but is not limited to:
- Employee discounts online and instore to help your team’s salary go further, as well as purchase the products and experiences that make them happy.
- Salary sacrifice schemes, including travel season tickets, annual leave purchase and childcare vouchers
- Employee wellbeing initiatives, such as cycle to work schemes, discounted gym memberships and health screenings.
Ready to implement employee retention strategies within your organisation? Getting it right and making sure you’re maximising staff retention isn’t easy, but here at Sodexo Engage we’ve been helping organisations just like yours for over 60 years.
We won’t just provide you with a list of solutions and leave you to it—our experienced team of employee engagement experts will work with you to identify the right strategy for your company culture and workforce, supporting you the whole way during the decision making and implementation process.
To find out more about how we can help you to reduce staff turnover, increase employee engagement and reap all of the benefits that comes with it, get in touch with us today.