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Reduce Turnover With Employee Retention Strategies

Whether it's due to competitor attraction, the rapidly growing popularity of gig work, career changes, or just a disgruntled employee, the threat of losing staff is more real and pervasive than ever before.

In this specialist guide by our experienced HR consultancy team, we explore the best employee retention strategies that'll keep your workforce engaged and eager to stay on.

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The best employee retention strategies to reduce turnover

As an employer, you don't need to overthink your approach to staff engagement. With only a handful of tactics, you can stand yourself out from competitors and keep talented professionals on your team.

- Salary benchmarking and benefits: Make sure you're offering competitive wages and look to include great perks in with your pay packages. Benefits can include flexible working policies, salary reviews, employee assistant programs (EAPs), and much more.

- Structured career development: If you invest in employee growth you can expect long-term commitment. It's a fantastic way to train your managers of the future by guiding them towards greater internal career opportunities.

- Focus on work-life balance: Hybrid working is a big deal for modern professionals. Whether it's fully remote opportunities or a few WFH days a week, it removes time-consuming and stressful commutes, plus allows staff to enjoy more downtime.

- Reward success: Whether you have a bonus scheme for meeting KPIs or a full employee recognition program, acknowledging and rewarding hard work goes a long way.

- Get staff feedback: Sending out occasional staff feedback forms (confidential ones) gets genuine feedback to higher management. This opportunity lets employees state clearly what they think, which you can act on to improve company culture.

- Create a strong onboarding process: This streamlines the process of training new hires, supporting them through their first week days or weeks. By doing this, it'll help new starters understand your business and more seamlessly start working with colleagues.

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Why you should consider evaluating pay and other benefits

If you have the budget, consider salary reviews as part of your employment contracts. This is often an area many employers choose to ignore, but pay rises are important to reward hardworking staff members and to show your awareness of the cost of living.

This provides an outlet to bolster wellbeing culture. For instance, benefits such as extra holidays days, private healthcare and discounted gym memberships could be integrated as part of a new and improved package.

Remember, benefits don’t have to cost the earth. Flexible working is consistently voted one of the most-valued employee benefits, so if you can’t afford pay rises or other cash rewards, there’s all the more reason to try and accommodate staff’s working preferences as much as possible.

Updating your benefits package will boost employee satisfaction and is likely to curb turnover. Along with your other strategies, these can go a long way to reducing employee burnout and other common workplace wellbeing struggles.

Go a step further with innovative employee retention strategies

If you want to try something a bit different,

-Offer more working freedom: Trust your staff to get on with their jobs. A great way to do this is allow them to work the way they want, free from any micromanagement that can ruin productivity in the long-term.

-Improve business transparency: Providing staff with regular updates through meetings or company-wide emails is a productive initiative. By actively keeping employees in the loop, you can make them feel a genuine part of your business success.

-Invest in quality equipment: Provide your team with the right tools and resources to keep working effectively. This may mean quality computers, chairs, desks, and office supplies. It goes a long way to keeping staff engaged.

-Foster teamwork and social events: It's important that colleagues get along, that way the projects they work on together experience the best results. In-work time can be developed by having regular social events or fun days.

-Develop bright young star engagement opportunities: Take training programs a step further by focusing on young talent. This initiative can train up the likes of recent graduates or apprentices to learn managerial skills in a fully supportive career development campaign.

Revitalise your workforce with our expert support

Whether you're in need of advice around flexible working, looking for expert HR training, or in need of more hands-on support with strategic tasks such as job evaluation, pay benchmarking and organisational design, our HR and Employment Law specialists are on hand to help.

To discuss your needs and discover how we can help you to navigate your post-pandemic workforce challenges, retain your employees and achieve your organisational goals, call 0345 226 8393.

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FAQs

​It's a set of internal business policies and practices used to reduce the number, and frequency, of employees leaving. With the right tactics, you can help keep more valuable staff members engaged in the long-term, which can help reduce costly turnover rates.

The right tactics can save you a lot of time and money, while also boosting your brand's reputation. Recruitment is expensive and when you're constantly replacing employees, it can be very demanding and draining on your productivity. By investing in staff retention, you can keep talented professionals in your business, alongside preserving important brand knowledge, and creating a positive company culture.

You'll need an extensive range of tactics to engage with employees and provide them with a reason to stay. Consider introducing:

  • Competitive pay

  • Business transparency

  • Career development opportunities

  • Wellbeing programs (such as EAPs)

  • Work-life balance

  • Training opportunities

  • Social events and fun days

When staff members regularly leave your business, it consistently creates financial demands on replacing them. There's also the time that needs investing into recruiting appropriate replacements, then settling them into your business. Ultimately, it also reflects poorly on your brand reputation if you have a high turnover rate.

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