READ TIME – 5 MINUTES
Retaining top talent continues to be a priority for many employers. As the cost of living crisis continues to rag on, the idea of assigning a budget to replace employees who leave your company is something business managers don’t want to entertain. This is where staff retention strategies come into play.
When deciding on the best approach to take to retain staff, several options spring to mind. The most common (and obvious) retention strategy is to offer pay rises. Whilst pay rises have a proven record of retaining top talent, they aren’t always viable.
If this is the case for your business, we need to find alternate staff retention strategies that will help keep morale high and boost performance.
Here are 4 staff retention strategies AvA-V recommend to increase your chances of keeping hold of your top performers.
Encourage Development Opportunities
Development opportunities are one of the most effective ways to improve staff retention. Offering career development, learning and training plans can be a fantastic and cost-efficient way to solve your staffing issue.
Personal development has been something that employees seek for a long time, but it has seen a surge in importance in recent times. This is because the next wave of employees is more focused on their future.
According to Gallup, 87% of Millennials say that professional development and career growth are very important to them.
With the surge of Millennials and Gen-Z entering the workplace, refining your career development opportunities could be an alternative to offering pyrites.
If you’re efficient with your planning, you can incorporate this as a benefit in your recruitment process. You can list training and development as benefits in your job adverts and offers of employment. This will help your new hires understand the benefits of the role early doors, allowing you to avoid the awkward conversations that pay rises accompany.
Show Employee Recognition
To avoid the financial and time costs hiring new employees brings, you should tell your existing employees how well they’re doing.
Employee recognition and appreciation are vital for staff morale and increasing their engagement with their work. It’s also a MUCH cheaper solution than offering them pyrites or losing them altogether!
As workplace standards increase and staff expectations are raised, you must ensure that you’re setting the tone as a leader by offering support when required and celebrating their successes.
Doing this will also aid you in retaining your best staff.
Acknowledging when your employees have completed a difficult task, celebrating their achievements in the office or sharing their success stories on the company’s social media channels will show your staff that you care about them, their lives and their goals.
Develop An Environment Where People Want To Work
Creating a diverse, lively and exciting work environment is one of the cheapest and most effective staff retention strategies out there… so why don’t more employers do it?
The simple answer is that several managers don’t understand how to lead a team.
Overworking your people and providing them with little support will cause them to feel disengaged.
If your company is full of disengaged and isolated individuals, you will struggle to develop a strong company culture.
Poor company culture will cause more employees to leave and will put off potential candidates in the future.
So, how do we tackle this issue?
There are a few paths you can take when creating a positive work environment. You can focus on the culture within your team and hire people with similar mindsets, ambitions and goals. This will help embed team unification.
There are also practical things you can do that will help develop a positive atmosphere. You can offer free snacks/breakfast, hold team-building exercises and incorporate occasional early finishes. These are all little bonuses that will go a long way to increasing morale across the office.
Hire the Right People
It’s worth noting that you can avoid many issues regarding staff retention strategies can be avoided by initially hiring the right people.
As the employer, it’s your responsibility to clearly explain every detail of a role to potential applicants so they understand what they’re signing up for.
If you oversell/undersell the role, don’t sell your whole range of benefits enough or hire someone based solely on their experience, you risk upsetting them further down the line.
To avoid these issues, you need to find the right balance in your recruitment process. Ensure your hiring managers sell the role and how great your company is, but don’t let them overdo it.
Similarly, providing successful candidates with a detailed onboarding plan will help set expectations at the beginning of their employment. As a result, they’ll be more likely to buy into your other retention strategies.
How to Develop Your Staff Retention Strategies with The Help of AvA-V
As much as you’d like to reward hardworking employees who’ve helped your organisation grow, sometimes a pay rise is not an option. This isn’t a reason to panic, as there are many great alternatives to offering monetary incentives.
Development opportunities, career progression and company culture are all valuable assets to your employees. These are things job hunters will look for in their next role, so they should be things you develop within your business.
If you’re struggling to develop solid staff retention strategies, speak to us so we can provide the leadership training you require to help you lead a modern organisation.