What Is Employee Retention and Why Should Your Business Be Taking It Seriously?
What goes into making a successful business? There are several different aspects but one of the most important is a good range of employees supporting you. This doesn’t just mean getting the right people on board either, it means creating a positive work environment that ensures individuals want to continue to work for you. Employee retention will not only make it so your best employees will stick around, it will also make it so that your company has a good reputation amongst employees, meaning you retain good talent but attract it as well.
It can’t be understated just how crucial it is that a business has good employee retention. This article is going to talk in a bit more detail about what employee retention actually is, why businesses need to take it seriously and what businesses can do in order to improve their retention efforts.
What is Employee Retention?
Let’s start with what employee retention is. It can easily be defined as a business’s ability to keep all its employees on board. If your business has poor retention and as such, a high turnover, then you should update the way you operate. A high turnover is a sign that you aren’t providing the right support to your employees and the strategies and processes that you implement are having a negative impact on your staff’s attitude towards your organisation.
Recent data shows that employee retention seems to vary depending on the industry that you operate within. The best example for this can be seen in the fact that within the public sector, employee turnover is around 20%. On the other hand, in professional services the turnover is higher at 60%.
When a company decides to take account of all the different strategies it has in place and how these might affect employee retention, they are able to make positive changes that will benefit staff and their brand. You can take advantage of the benefits that come with having a loyal and happy workforce behind you.
What Makes Employee Retention So Important?
It is very important that companies have good employee retention. There are a large number of advantages that come with this but one of the most prevalent has to be good retention improves a business’s reputation. A company with good retention is usually a company that people enjoy working for. This means that said organisation will have a good employee reputation and a good employee reputation leads to a good reputation overall.
Why Is Reputation So Important?
Having your business painted in a positive light to the public means that customers and candidates are going to be more likely to engage with you. If a candidate is on the lookout for a potential role and they see one within your business, they are likely going to have a look at what your employee turnover and subsequently your employee reputation is like. If this does not look good to these candidates, then they would likely stay away from applying for work with your business.
Not only will it affect who applies for roles at your business, but your employee reputation will trickle down and influence your business’s reputation as a whole. It doesn’t matter how good your marketing team are, what kind of adverts you run and what kind of content you create, if you have a bad reputation following your business around then it is going to be difficult for you to secure clients.
Reputation and personality are important to customers these days. The increase in use of social media and the amount of people who like to discover a more personal side to businesses means that reputation, both the way companies treat their customers and employees, is very important. If it turns out an organisation is not supporting its customers or is treating them badly, people will be reluctant to work with this business. There is a very clear example of this occurring which has happened recently…
P&O Cruises and How to Destroy a Brand
There have been a few issues that surround P&O cruises recently and these are a clear reflection of just how much the public react to a company not treating its employees in the right way. They implemented a ‘fire and rehire’ scheme a few months ago which left employees stranded and jobless. Unions, members of the public and politicians all expressed their outrage at the situation, commenting how the way P&O cruises behaved was entirely unacceptable.
This is a very clear example of how employee retention, reputation and subsequent business reputation can negatively impact a brand and result in a lack of sales. A lot of people decided to boycott P&O after finding out about the mass firings and as such, the company saw a huge overall decrease in profits.
When you focus on employee retention and reputation, you are focusing on creating a better place for your employees to work. Members of the public will see this and be much more likely to engage with your business as a result.
How Can You Improve Employee Retention?
So, now that it has been covered just how important employee retention is, it is worth discussing what methods are available to businesses that will allow them to improve their retention. They include the following:
Implement a Better Process When Hiring People
The process through which you hire people is very important when it comes to your overall retention of said people. You will be ensuring that you get the right people on board in the first place, which means you will be working with people who are a lot more likely to enjoy their role. One of the most effective ways that you can improve your hiring process is by enlisting the services of a recruitment company.
These organisations now use the likes of AI and Machine Learning in order to put the best possible candidates in front of you. Not to mention, they will use software provided by organisations such as Yoono so they can run checks on prospective employees. This means that everyone who eventually comes in for an interview is a lot more likely to be someone you could see yourself doing business with.
Make Improvements to Your Onboarding Process for New Hires
There are several reasons as to why employees leave the roles that they are in; however, one of the most common is that they didn’t receive adequate training. If people aren’t trained properly then they tend to leave within the first year of starting a company. This makes sense as if you don’t feel like you know what you’re doing in your role, this is a stressful situation that you would likely look to leave. The whole process of training your employees in the right way starts with onboarding and as such, your business should focus on making this as airtight as possible.
When you are being attentive towards new hires and giving them an informative and in-depth onboarding process, you will be giving them a solid first impression (this is always a good sign). You will not only be able to teach your employee about their role but you will be able to inform them about your company, your ethos and what makes you stand out from the rest of the competition.
Gain Feedback and Act on It
You need to make sure that you are giving your employees enough freedom and enough of a say to make it so that they know they aren’t just making up numbers. One of the best ways you can do this is by making it clear that employees are able to leave feedback and be sure that you listen to that feedback as well.
If it is negative, then it maybe you can use it to introduce some changes into the ways that you do things. No system is perfect, and no one knows your system better than your employees, so if they pick out a fault and there is a way to fix it, why not act on that? By doing so, you are going to be showing employees that their opinion matters and that you value them as a member of the team. People will feel a lot more inclined to stay if you give them these kinds of reasons to stick around.
If the feedback is positive, then you will be able to use it to improve your employee reputation and your businesses reputation. You could encourage employees to post their positive feedback on social media, different review websites and other spaces online so that customers and candidates alike will be able to see how much of a good business you are.
The Additional Benefits of Employee Retention
Though employee retention can have a large impact on your business’s overall reputation, it also has several other benefits too. These include but are not limited to the below:
Costs of Recruitment Are Reduced
This is a simple benefit to wrap your head around, when you have a high turnover and keep needing to get new people in as a result, this is going to cost you a lot more in the form of recruitment costs. It will also cost you a lot of time due to the fact you will need to carry out interviews and welcome people on to your team as well.
Not only that but your company could lose out on potential business if there is a high turnover. If a lot of your staff are inexperienced, then they are not going to be able to speak to customers in the same way experienced members of staff will be able to. This in turn will lead to a dip in quality and could lead to more customers being reluctant to work with you.
Increased Productivity
When you have more experienced employees working for you, it tends to be that productivity and engagement are a lot better. Long term employees are more clued up on a business’s values, ethos and services, meaning it is not as hard for them to make choices and they can accomplish tasks at an improved rate as well.
Your Company Culture is Better
Company culture is important when it comes to keeping your employees happy as they will begin to see you and co-workers as friends as opposed to simply people they work with. Work can get done in a much more streamlined manner when there is good company culture and the familiarity that comes with little turnover is a massive factor when it comes to improving company culture.
You should be sure to follow in the footsteps of a lot of organisations who take their company culture seriously in an effort to keep their employees happy, ensuring people stay with you. There is an array of different methods that you can implement to do this but some of the most popular include celebrating your employees, having good holidays, and celebrating your place of work.
Why Employee Retention is So Important
A lot of elements go into making a business great, but employee retention must be one of the most important. When you can improve your place of work so that individuals are happy to work for you, you will ensure you keep the top talent, improve your company’s reputation, reduce costs, create a better company culture, and improve productivity as a whole.
There are a range of different ways that you can make sure you and your business are focusing on client retention. This can be by improving your hiring process by using recruiters and software such as Yoono, ensuring your onboarding process is in tip top condition and making sure employees have the chance to give feedback which you take on board (regardless of whether it is negative or positive).
