Why Employee Retention is Important and How to Improve Retention

In the current highly-competitive job market, keeping top-performing employees in your organization is essential. Employee retention is important for your business to promote organizational growth, boost productivity, and increase revenue.

Wolf Creek Business Growth Institute has several ways to craft a strong retention strategy and retain top talent at your organization.

What is Employee Retention?

Employee retention is an organization’s ability to keep employees from leaving the company in a certain period through benefits, advancement opportunities, recognition, etc. Employee retention is important because it plays a vital role in the health and success of your business.

[Related: Difference Between Retention and Turnover]

How to Improve Employee Retention

To improve employee retention, business owners and leaders should create strategies and practices to keep top talent from leaving the company and applying to a competitor. To craft the best strategy to retain the most employees, you must examine your hiring and onboarding processes first. Retention starts before a new hire’s start date.

Design and refine a hiring process that will allow you to select people that best embody your company’s core values. You’ll want to ask questions that will give you a better understanding of how a candidate views your core values, such as examples of previous employment. If you hire right, you’ll be able to retain more employees.

After selecting the person or people you want on your team, you need to make them feel like they are a part of the company before their first day on the job. You can do this by:

• Putting a welcome sign on their desk
• Sending a company t-shirt they could wear on their first day
• Sending them personalized business cards in the mail

This step in your strategy for employee retention is important because you need to make them feel vital to your operations. Invite new employees to lunch and ask them about their first days or week. Continue this by conducting quarterly meetings to check their progress and ask for feedback to understand what you can do to improve.

[Related: Why Business Communication is a Form of Problem Solving]

The Key to Retaining Employees

An important step in your employee retention strategy should be learning what motivates your employees. If you understand what motivates your employees, you can engage them. If you can engage your employees, you can retain them.

Recognition is usually a primary motivator for employees. People want to be recognized for their hard work, and if they feel you acknowledge their contribution to the company, they will likely stay with your organization. You could have an employee of the month sign in your break room or create a section about outstanding employees in your company newsletter.

Other important employee retention motivators are:

• Offer opportunities for advancement
• Offer paid time off
• Flexible work options, like a work-from-home or hybrid environment
• Healthcare and mental health resources

Your main goal is to get your employees to develop an ownership mentality regarding your organization. A strategy for employee retention is important as it is a way to keep your staff engaged, thus increasing productivity and morale.

The Benefits of Employee Retention

Employee retention is important for your business because there are several significant benefits your organization can gain from a well-executed retention strategy. A boost in productivity and morale through engagement is a perfect example, as stated above. This also improves customer experience, as employees will know how to interact and sell to new and existing customers when they take ownership and understand the company as a whole.

Another reason employee retention is important is that the longer employees are with your company, the more proactive they become. Empower your employees to make decisions without consulting you or a supervisor. Doing this means they won’t always make the right decisions, but letting them learn from their mistakes will create a workforce that isn’t always reliant on upper management.

The cost of hiring new employees is typically three to four times the position’s salary. Employee retention is important because it will save you the time and money required to recruit and onboard new employees. Plus, you or another business leader can spend the time it would take training new hires on improving the business.

Wolf Creek BGI Offers Business Coaching That Can Help with a Solid Retention Strategy

Now that you understand the importance of employee retention, it’s time to develop a winning strategy. The business coaches at Wolf Creek BGI can help you refine your retention strategy to help you retain the superstars on your team. Call us today at 225-219-8866 to start a solid retention strategy for your organization.