5 Key Employee Retention Strategies

In today's highly competitive business environment, hiring and retaining top talent on your workforce is critical to your overall growth and success. And yet, high employee turnover (low employee retention) is a disease that seems to persistently plague even some of the best companies.

​How do you boost your employee retention rates to the maximum? Here are five key strategies to use in that endeavor:

1. A Great Benefits Package
Besides a competitive wage, clearly an essential for retaining top talent in any industry, you need to make your company more attractive than your competition with a superior employee benefits package.

Promote your benefits, be they health insurance, a pension plan, paid days off, free child care during work hours, employee transportation programs, or discounts on company products/services, annually during open enrollment. Then ensure your programs are managed wisely all year round.

It is often benefits that tip the balance in favor of one job as opposed to another, from the employee's point of view. Invest in consulting services and do everything necessary, therefore, to ensure your benefits package is truly "robust."

2. Wise Recruitment/Orientation Practices
Properly screening and selecting your employees to begin with, and then feeling it not too great a risk to seriously invest in basic orientation and training, is the foundation for employee retention.

Remember that it's not just retaining employees but retaining good employees that must be your goal. Attract, hire, and train those good employees, and you've already won half the battle!

3. Providing Worthwhile Advancement Opportunities
Besides "basic training," you need to build an upper tier training program that will correspond to managerial and other more advanced positions. Don't let your employees think they are in a "dead end job," and that in order to advance, they will have to go elsewhere (or they will!)

And besides on the job training, for certain positions, you should even invest in online education and help pay for employee training at workshops, seminars, or in classroom education settings, if they can manage to keep working for you part-time at least at the same time as taking classes.

4. Consider Employee's "Work-Life Balance"
You will have some employees who genuinely want to work "all the time," who are, perhaps, single and focused on nothing but their career. But most employees will not be of that sort.

Work with your valued employees as much as possible on scheduling issues and hours per week. Most employees understand if they can't always get precisely what they want here, but a no-discussion, "we'll decide and you just be there" approach can drive away many good employees.

5. Use Recognition and Rewards
You probably have a system where if employees are late too often or perform a "no call, no show," or violate certain standards of conduct, they will get negative points and eventually be terminated. But do you have a positive program as well?

When an employee always shows up and on time, goes the extra mile or does an exceptionally great job on a project, or volunteers for overtime on a busy weekend (when you really needed help), show some appreciation. It goes a long way. Send a thank you email, give out achievement awards, or hand out an occasional gift card.

When one employee suddenly leaves, that disrupts your business and gets other employees thinking about doing the same. But there are ways to prevent this scenario from happening.

Contact Summerlin Benefits Consulting to learn more about employee retention strategies today!