For many companies, hiring cools off as the temperature heats up. That’s because your potential new employees probably aren’t thinking about a career move. They’re too busy going on vacation, shuttling kids to camp, perfecting their landscaping, and spending time with loved ones. But, this recruiting slowdown is an ideal opportunity to focus on improving the employment experience for your existing team members. Employee engagement and retention are vital to any organization’s success, so we should never let retention activities cool off. At this year’s employer summer camp, we’ll show you how to earn your retention merit badge.
Before we create a strategy to improve employee retention, let’s define the term. Simply put, employee retention is keeping the team members you’ve already hired within your organization. The opposite of employee retention is employee turnover, which is the measure of how many team members leave your firm. Maintaining a stable base of talent is critical for the prosperity and longevity of your company. Let’s take a look at the benefits of strong employee retention and the consequences of weak employee retention.
When the majority of your workers stay, your company enjoys:
Unfortunately, the reverse is true when your company’s employee retention rate is low.
When a large percentage of your staff leaves, your organization suffers:
As you can see, strong employee retention creates powerful teams that get things done - and saves your company money. Conversely, weak employee retention results in fragmented teams that struggle to keep pace - and negatively impacts your bottom line.
So, how do you ensure that your firm doesn’t experience the destructive effects of weak employee retention? You create an employee retention plan, which is a system designed to keep workers engaged with your company long-term. To make your plan, you must understand what your workers need, identify ways to support those needs, and allocate resources for doing so.
Here’s what your team members are looking to your company to provide:
To meet those needs, your company should:
Once your plan is complete, it's time to implement it! While it’s a lot of work, you should see an uptick in retention soon.
Your retention plan has to be dynamic. You can’t create it, implement the initiatives, and call it done forever. Your employees’ needs and desires will change over time, and your program must adapt to accommodate them. If it doesn’t, your retention rate will plummet as your team members leave to work for your more progressive competitors.
Here’s how to keep your retention plan up to date and prevent the mass exodus from happening:
You should also proactively seek ways to improve each aspect of your plan, like adding a new course to your first-time manager training program or increasing each employee’s professional development bank. By remaining committed to this process, your company will reap the reward of strong employee retention for years to come.
Believe it or not, the quest for employee retention starts when you meet a potential new team member. That’s because hiring the right employee for the right role is crucial to them remaining in the position long-term. If there’s a mismatch between the worker’s abilities and personality and the job’s duties and responsibilities, the worker will become unhappy and quit or perform poorly and get fired. When this happens, your company wastes valuable time and money.
To ensure that there’s a good fit between the role and the prospective team member, you must be fully transparent about the position. You don’t want your new employee to be unpleasantly surprised later. You should also consider using behavioral assessments in your hiring process. An assessment will give you insight into the candidate’s strengths, weaknesses, and other innate characteristics, which can help you to determine if they’re well-suited for your open role.
Omnia is a leading behavioral assessment provider. Our assessments are simple to administer and take minutes to complete. We also provide a full analysis of the results so that you can make informed hiring decisions quickly and easily. By partnering with Omnia, you can feel confident that every new team member is getting started on the right foot, increasing your chance of keeping them aboard for the long haul.
This summer, make retaining your current employees a top priority. If you create and implement an employee retention plan, you’ll keep top talent in-house indefinitely, maintaining that critical competitive edge. If you’d like to make behavioral assessments part of that plan or need some guidance, we’re here for you!