Keeping hold of your staff members over an extended period
of time is a key consideration for many companies. To begin with, you are not
going to have to keep on recruiting all the time, and you can also build up
your company from a position of stability. Not only this, but experience can
also build up, ensuring that new staff members can be trained up more easily.
There are plenty of different methods of retaining employees over an extended
period of time, and the following blog post will be checking out just a few of
these in a higher level of detail. This way, you may well be able to use a
combination of these different options depending on the type of company that
you are running and its priorities.
Ensure Successful Onboarding
To begin with, you need to have a clear onboarding strategy in place. This is going to mean that your staff members who are
just starting out are going to get up to speed sooner rather than later. It can
be highly overwhelming when you are first starting out at a new company, and if
the onboarding process is not taken seriously, this can end up meaning that
they will not get a positive first impression and may even end up leaving
sooner than they would have done otherwise.
Think About the Package of Employee Benefits
While the salary is obviously going to be an important part
of ensuring that you keep hold of staff members, there has also been an
ever-growing trend towards looking at company benefits and how this can end up playing a central role in
everything. It is going to be worthwhile ensuring that you choose the right
package of benefits to suit your members of staff as some are going to be more
appealing than others. You also need to factor this into the overall spend on
staff members.
Create a Mentorship Program
Another one of the best steps that you can take is to create
an employee mentorship program in which staff members are properly paired up
with one another. This way, a more experienced staff member can help out with a
more junior one in order to get them up to speed and settled into the company
and ensure that everything is going smoothly. This can help out as part of the
overall package of onboarding, ensuring that concerns and questions can be
answered by a peer in situations in which speaking to managers can simply feel
like an option that is too overwhelming or difficult for one reason or another.
Look to Review Salaries on a Regular Basis
While benefits have just been mentioned as being more and
more important at modern companies, there is no doubt that you need to be
looking to review salaries on a regular basis. This ensures that you are clearly
demonstrating to staff members that they are properly appreciated. At the same
time, you are certainly going to need to look at what your direct competitors
and other similar organizations are doing. Otherwise, there is always going to
be the very real risk out there that your staff members are going to end up
getting poached, and there is not a huge amount that you are able to do about
it.
Seek to Boost Employee Wellness
There is no doubt that employee wellness is another
important factor that can make all the difference when it comes to keeping hold
of staff members. Increasingly, this is coming from a mental as well as a
physical standpoint. So, this can mean offering healthy lifestyle perks such as
free fresh fruit and gym memberships, but it can also mean ensuring that access
to counseling services is fully provided. When employees are at their
healthiest, they are more likely to do their best level of work. At the same
time, they are less likely to take days off work, which can seriously help out
when it comes to reducing the overall level of employee absenteeism that is
going on at your company.
Keep a Regular Stream of Communication with Staff Members
Ensuring that you communicate properly with all of your
staff members can also have a big impact on what you are doing at your company.
First of all, you are much more likely to be able to pick up on any issues that
happen to be occurring and can therefore nip them all in the bud. Communication
also comes in the form of ensuring that any damaging conflicts are properly
taken care of. Not only this, but you should also think about communication
from the point of view of ensuring that you are providing your staff with the
recognition that they deserve”both in public and in private.
Provide Plenty of Training and Development
You can also do more in terms of ensuring that staff members
have access to all of the learning and development opportunities that they
would like. After all, this is a priority for many people as they would like to
be able to reach their full potential. With so many training packages readily
available online at all times, there is no doubt that training is more
accessible than it ever was in days gone by. Again, communication can prove to
be invaluable as it means that you can do more in terms of providing the
specific package of training and development that is the most appealing.
Put in Place a System of Recognition and Rewards
You can also do more in terms of putting in place a package
of recognition and rewards. Ultimately, this is going to mean that you are
demonstrating that staff members are valuable, and it can also encourage people
to try as hard as they possibly can to gain this recognition. Essentially, one
of the top reasons why staff members can end up leaving a company sooner rather
than later is that they simply do not feel like they are being treated properly
at their current company, which can easily lead them to look elsewhere.
Help to Create a Better Work/Life Balance
There is also more that you should be able to do in terms of
offering staff members the type of work/life balance that suits them. To begin with, you can look to provide more
flexible working as and when this is at all possible. This has become an awful
lot more normal for all sorts of companies out there. At the same time, you can
also seek to offer an increased number of vacation days”or perhaps a system in
which these gradually start to build up over time. Being understanding in terms
of childcare issues can also end up going a long way.
Manage Change Effectively
It is an inevitable part of a company that changes
are going to occur over time. However, the way in which these are managed can
end up making such a big difference. First of all, it all comes back to proper
communication and ensuring that everyone is fully on board with what is
happening. Offering a high level of reassurance can also be invaluable.
Ultimately, you do not want everyone to feel like they are going to need to
look elsewhere, so bringing on board your longer-term members of staff to help
out with the change is also an excellent step to take on board.
Foster a Positive Team Environment
Beyond everything else that has already been mentioned so
far in this blog post, there is no doubt that you will be wanting to create the
most positive team environment that you possibly can. Obviously, as a company
continues to grow and evolve, this can prove to be more and more of a
challenge, which is why you need to keep on going back and reviewing and
refreshing your current strategy as much as possible. If you do not take steps
to manage an employee culture properly, there is every chance that it can start
to mutate out of control in a way that can be highly damaging to all that you
are trying to achieve.
All of these are amongst the different ways in which members
of staff can be retained over the longest period of time possible. Ultimately,
this provides you with some relatively general advice that is going to need to
be tailored depending on your specific company. However, at the center of all
that you are doing, you need to keep a close eye on what your staff members
want the most, which is going to be achieved based on ensuring that you keep in
close contact with them at all times. You should also be looking to evolve as a
company, which is bound to happen the longer that you exist. Keeping a steady
core of staff members can help to fully ensure that you are doing it the right
way, as well as providing numerous other benefits that are more than worth
having.