Did you know? An average employee exit costs 33% of their annual salary. Most people think hiring the right talent is the most difficult task. While it is true, retaining them is the most real challenge. Studies show that at least 35% of employees may leave their jobs by 2023. Thus keeping talent has become the HR team’s top priority. This article discusses what employee retention is and how to build a successful employee retention strategy.
What is Employee Retention?
Employee retention is an organization’s ability to keep employees within its company. A company’s employee retention strategy must focus on fostering the employee experience and resources to retain its staff.
More than 20% of HR leaders find it tough to prioritize employee retention as other factors take away their budget and attention.
It is also crucial to analyze and understand the employee turnover rate to ensure the company’s long-term success.
The turnover rate is the number of employees who leave a company during a specific time period. Companies strive to manage and avoid high turnover, as employee retention is the critical element of recruiting.
What is the Cost of Turnover?
Employee retention strategies become more vital when a company focuses on the cost of turnover.
Employee retention strategies become more vital when a company focuses on the cost of turnover. The cost to replace an employee can be double the position’s salary. Furthermore, the cost to replace increases as the seniority level of the position increases costing as much as 400% of the position’s salary.
What is Employee Retention Program?
Having an employee retention program helps companies to lower turnover. However, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy to build an effective retention program. A successful retention strategy starts with an effective hiring process. Here’re a few factors a successful retention program should consist of.
- Proper planning that describes how the company will create future leaders.
- Rigorous vetting process to select only the highly qualified candidates.
- Effective strategies to retain talent.
How to Boost Retention and Manage your Retention Program
Internal mobility programs play a crucial role in talent retention strategy. Internal mobility can be referred to as the employee movement across different roles within a company.
Internal mobility should be a primary element of company culture. As internal mobility is crucial for effective retention, it must be the primary focus of the human resources department.
In order to make your internal mobility strategy effective, you need to –
- Ensure your internal mobility strategy is correctly integrated with all departments and the entire company.
- Create clear goals for internal mobility.
- Create an easy way for your employees to access internal movement opportunities.
Here’re six key principles to develop a successful employee retention strategy.
1. Recruit the Right People
As said, an effective retention strategy should start with hiring the right talent. Ensure you create clearly defined job descriptions to attract qualified candidates and those who fit with your company culture.
2. Ensure Salaries are Competitive
Salaries are one of the major factors why employees leave companies. In order to attract the right talent, you need to offer competitive packages. Also, do not forget that other benefits, such as insurance, incentives, bonuses, paid time off, etc, are also deciding factors for employees when choosing a company.
3. Make your Employees Feel Valued
People will forget what you said and did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Employees are the precious assets of an organization. It’s important to celebrate their professional and personal accomplishments. A simple recognition on their special days can go a long way in your employee engagement process.
4. Offer Flexibility
Everyone knows this – employees’ lives are stressful. Especially after this pandemic, they need a flexible life to cope with daily challenges. Also, work flexibility can boost productivity as it eases employees’ lives. So, whether your employees work from home or the office, ensure you provide them enough flexibility and freedom to work productively.
5. Provide Feedback & Training
Providing feedback and training to help them grow and move forward in their career is the best thing an employer can do for its employees. Help your employees with the resources they need to engage and grow within your organization.
6. Improve Internal Mobility
Employees always look forward to working in companies that help them climb the corporate ladder. Providing plenty of internal mobility opportunities, you attract them to stay with your company.
Bottom Line
Retaining top talent is the most complicated task for the HR department. To keep the talent and lower the cost of turnover, a company should have a productive employee retention strategy. These above tips should help you build a successful strategy to retain your potential employees.
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