7 Tips for Keeping your Best Employees from Leaving

 

High employee turnover is bad for business. When your best employees move on to pastures new, you’re left with mounting costs as you try to replace them. Finding top talent requires time, money and a whole lot of effort.

So when you have hard-working and dedicated employees on your books, you don’t want to let them go. But how can you keep them happy and stop them from leaving? Here are seven tips for hanging on to your best employees:

Develop a Great Workplace Culture
Your workplace culture makes a big difference to staff retention. If people are going to carry on coming to your office day in, day out, there needs to be something more than a pay packet to motivate them. A great workplace culture is transparent and communicative. It offers great perks like healthy office snacks, gym membership or flexible working. And it’s always a comfortable and positive place to work.

Recognise Their Efforts
It’s a simple thing to do but one that makes a heap of difference. Recognising the efforts and achievements of your employees is essential practice as a manager. How you do it will depend upon the achievement and the person in question. But you could consider a pay rise, a bonus or just a simple acknowledgement of a job well done. Employees who feel appreciated are much more likely to stick around.

Give Opportunities for Progression
A big reason that the best employees look for employment elsewhere is lack of career progression where they are. Everyone wants to feel that they’re making progress in their jobs. Don’t be too stingy with your promotions. And, if you’re a small company without much scope for moving upwards, expand your employees’ responsibilities outwards. It could be that they take on new responsibilities or diversify their role in order to develop their skills and experience.

Always Recruit the Best
Your best employees won’t appreciate doing more than their fair share of the workload. They want to work alongside team members who possess a skill and motivation level similar to their own. This means they don’t have to carry teammates who lack ability or enthusiasm. When it comes to recruitment, always seek out the best of the best.

Offer Training and Development
Training allows your employees to learn new skills. The right programmes can help them to do their jobs better or even make headway towards a promotion. A good training and development scheme also boosts loyalty amongst employees – they’re unlikely to take their new skills and move on right away when they can see that you have invested in them.

Be Clear in your Expectations
No-one thrives in an environment where the goal posts are constantly being moved. Your best employees want to know what is expected of them, then they can work to achieve their targets. As their manager, you need to ensure that expectations are communicated clearly and aren’t changed mid-way through a project without thorough discussion amongst all parties involved.

Listen
Are your employees happy in their work? How do you really know unless you hear it from them? Use appraisals as an opportunity to get employee feedback. What do they like about working for your company? What improvements could they envisage? Listening to and understanding the needs of your employees means you’re much better placed to meet them.

It isn’t always possible to keep your best employees from leaving. Sometimes another opportunity is too good to pass up. But there are plenty of things you can do to improve staff retention. Put these strategies in place and it could be that your top talent is much happier to stay put for longer.

 

Rachel is a mother of 2 beautiful boys. She loves to hike and write about travelling, education and business. Rachel is also a great fan of sustainable living and a strong supporter of the sharing economy.