Employee Retention Strategies To Keep Your Best Talent

Retaining employees is a process that requires efforts, and clearly outlined strategies. Being a valuable investment for any company, employees make a company’s present productive and its future, bright. Hence, employee retention strategies should be implemented time to time in order to keep the talented pool motivated, focused and put.

What makes employee retention an important practice? 

As crucial as the hiring process, employee retention strategies offer businesses a range of benefits like higher productivity, reduced training costs, and relatively higher engagement, among others. More importantly, these practices can help a business perpetuate its expertise and knowledge by retaining its best people. 

Employee retention techniques can also lead to better employee experience, have significant cultural impact and build consistency and momentum amongst and across teams and the organization as a whole. 

A positive working culture and dedicated efforts to preserve a talented pool of resources can help an organization create an optimum environment for its employees, as well as better target their business goals. Employee retention is crucial to gain an edge over competitors in the marketplace and hence should be taken seriously.

Some employee retention ideas and techniques: 

Employee retention strategies involve a series of steps. From hiring the right person to employing effective training and development techniques, to creating a healthy working environment, employees can be retained only through continuous and sincere efforts. 

The process of employee retention is a collective one. It involves cooperation and solution-oriented approach at every level and position in the hierarchy of a business. Right from the entry of an employee to its exit, a business can derive various employee retention strategies and techniques just by listening, observing, and analyzing. 

Many companies use a Passive listening tool to improve the employee experience without running surveys. These help the employers understand morale, culture and communications within the organization, and enable them to take prompt action.

Other strategies that can help you target the number of employees leaving the organization, businesses can leverage a number of practices:

Thorough and meticulous hiring process 

Having a comprehensive hiring process can work wonders for employee retention. Drafting clear job descriptions and accurately aligning role responsibilities with experience, culture, and compensation can prove to be mutually beneficial for the organization and its employees. Additionally, paying attention to the personality traits a job requires and attempting to hire a person who checks the maximum number of those traits, if not all, is also an important aspect of the hiring process. 

Effective onboarding experience

Once the right person has been hired, optimize the onboarding and training experience. Communicate what is expected out of an employee, properly connect newcomers with the rest of the team, organize activities to build and reinforce work relationships, are all some of the important to-dos of the onboarding process. Furthermore, training and development are ongoing processes and should be undertaken on a bi-monthly or quarterly basis. 

A conducive working environment 

Create a supportive and positive environment by offering benefits and perks, cultural engagements, and inclusivity. Encourage work participation through rewards, and regular feedbacks. Similarly, focus on encouraging employees' educational endeavors and upskilling aspirations. Always put emphasis on teamwork but at the same time, recognize and appreciate individual efforts and engagement. Fostering respect for all the workers, regardless of the hierarchy in workplace should also be given utmost importance to create a balanced and just working environment. 

Know your employee and his/her development goals

Create a steep learning and growth curve for the employees by prioritizing internal hires and promotions (when possible), conducting trainings and seminars, providing opportunities for coaching and mentorship, and aligning with long terms goals and plans for development. 

Mental Health awareness  

Formation of a mental health department within an organization, regular check-ups for employees and a focus on mental health through workshops and activities, can be a great way to show that the company genuinely cares for its people.

Flexible work schedules 

Offering flexible work schedule like providing an employee with choice of preferred mode of work, whether entirely in-office, hybrid or completely remote, can help employees decide how to integrate work in their lives. This can also lead to higher productivity and work-life balance for the employees. 

Study the exit interviews 

Conducting exit interviews and their analysis can offer valuable insights, which organisations can then use to develop employee retention strategies and practices. 

Employee retention techniques and ideas thus, are a combination of feasible, everyday behavioral practices and exercises as well as long term welfare, development driven policies, initiatives, and programs. Once undertaken, these practices can prove to be very fruitful for a business, both in the short and long run.