5 Key Factors Affecting Employee Retention Rates

To successfully grow your business in both size and quality productivity, you have to win against your competition not only in drawing top talent but also in keeping it.

But what are the most important factors that affect whether your best employees stay or go? And what can you do in each area to maximally boost your employee retention rates?

1. Hiring & Initial Orientation
Focusing your recruitment and new hires orientation process to target only workers who are likely to stay with you for years to come is the first step in reducing employee loss.

Simply put, set yourself up for employee retention by making smart hires and making the orientation process such that only those truly a good fit for your company will be likely to persevere through it.

2. Your Benefits Package
Not only do you need to offer competitive compensation and administer payroll flawlessly, but you also need to offer an attractive benefits package if you expect your best employees to stay with you long term.

Health insurance, life insurance, dental/vision insurance, a pension plan, discretionary off-days (paid or unpaid), child care provision, a carpool program, discounts on your products/services, and other "perks" of the job often make the difference between employees leaving or staying.

3. A Responsive HR Department
Another reason why employees leave is that when they try to resolve an issue with the HR Department or file a complaint or a suggestion, there's no response. Or when someone does finally respond, the issue isn't resolved.

HR is overloaded in most businesses, and it therefore often fails to attend to employees concerns. A good idea is to invest in HR consulting or even HR admin outsourcing so that the HR Department workload doesn't take its toll on your employee retention rates.

4. Good Work-Life Balance
When you are under-staffed or don't have enough optimally productive workers, there's a tendency to over-rely on (over work) your top talent to the breaking point.

But even the most dedicated employees won't want to work all the time. They will want a reasonable amount of regular time off, the ability to take a vacation once a year for a week or two, and reasonable predictability in scheduling so they can plan how to manage off-work hours.

The nature of your business may restrict how far you can accommodate employees on this score, but do all you can - because when employees burn out, they oftentimes move on.

5. Offer Opportunity For Advancement
No matter how good a job may seem to an employee when he or she first gets hired, sooner or later he/she will want to pursue a raise, a promotion, or a new direction.

Put training programs into place that give your best, most motivated employees a clear career path to follow. If you don't have any room for them to improve their position while working for you, they'll likely try to improve it by going somewhere else.

Offering employees the best possible experience in the five areas listed above is a huge start to boosting employee retention to bring your business better stability, productivity, and long-term growth. But you should also reassess your employee retention strategies on an annual basis so that you can continually improve them.

To learn more about what affects employee retention rates and on how you can avoid the "revolving door syndrome", contact Summerlin Benefits Consulting today for targeted consulting or outsourcing services in Florida, Georgia, and beyond.