Retaining key employees is critical to the long-term health and success of your business. Managers readily agree that keeping your best employees ensures customer satisfaction, increased product sales, satisfied, happy coworkers, and effective succession planning and historical and institutional organizational knowledge and learning. 

Why is Employee Retention Important?

Employee retention matters. Failing to retain a key employee is costly to the bottom line and creates organizational issues such as insecure coworkers, excess job duties that coworkers must absorb, time invested in recruiting, hiring, and training a new employee.

Employee retention is a critical issue as companies compete for talent in a tight economy. The costs of employee turnover are increasingly high — as much as 2.5 times an employee’s salary depending on the role. And there are other “soft costs”: lowered productivity, decreased engagement, training costs and cultural impact.

If you wait until an exit interview to find out why a valuable employee has decided to move on, you’ve missed a golden opportunity — not just to keep a productive member of your team but to identify and fix issues within your organization before you lose others.

Instead, touching base with employees about what motivates them while they’re still on staff is part of a key strategy in gaining an edge in today’s tight talent market: employee retention.

Our Top Five Tips for Employee Retention

1: Identify Candidates who would stay the course

We believe it begins with picking the right candidate. There are just some candidates that are easier to retain longer than others. But how are we supposed to be able to identify them you ask?

There will be key indicators on their resume that you will be able to identify. Job-hoppers are somewhat of a gamble, although they may be looking for the right place to land… someone who has had 10 jobs in 12 years is going to be difficult for any company to retain.

2: Provide ongoing education and a clear path for career

Promoting from within not only provides a clear path to greater compensation and responsibility, it also helps employees feel that they’re valued and a crucial part of the company’s success.

According to new research from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), high-skills training (80 percent) and professional development programs to hone soft skills (74 percent) are perceived among the top benefits for retaining employees’ services over the next five years.

3: Provide a perception of fairness and equitable treatment

If a new sales rep is given the most potentially successful, commission-producing accounts, other staff members will inevitably feel cheated. If a new employee receives a promotion over the heads of long-term, existing employees, feelings of rancour will ensue.

Responsibility, duties and work should be distributed in a logical but fair way amongst the team members of close proximity. The morale of the slighted employee can take a downturn.

4: Establish two-way feedback

Have more frequent talks with your employees and establish a trusting and safe environment for them to be able to share all reservations that they may have. 

With that, the management can either try to provide logical explanation for its decision or try to solve the issue and reach an agreement on how things should proceed. 

Everyone likes to be heard and have an active conversation.

5: Allow employees to use their talents and skills

A motivated employee wants to contribute to work areas outside of his or her specific job description. Begin by taking the time to learn your employees’ skills, talents, and past and current experience. Then, tap into it.