High staff turnover is not a good look for any business. In addition to harming your reputation, constantly having to replace employees can drastically increase your recruitment and training costs. It can also damage staff morale and affect your organisation’s ability to function at its optimal level.
To put it simply, reducing staff turnover will not only make your workplace a more stable and pleasant place to be, it’ll also result in a healthy boost to your productivity and bottom line.
Employ The Right People
The first step in reducing staff turnover is hiring the right people in the first place. If someone is going to be a long-term employee, it’s not enough for them just to have a good skill set that matches your open position. They need to be a good fit for your company’s culture as well.
If employees don’t fit in with the culture of their work environment they won’t get along with their colleagues and can become lonely and isolated. This means they’re much more likely to move on to somewhere else where they fit in better.
Asking behavioural interview questions to find out how people react in certain situations is a good start. It’s also important to have a clearly defined and communicated mission statement and core values. Showing candidates around your business and telling them about your workplace culture is also very important. This will help candidates eliminate themselves if they aren’t going to fit in.
Offer Competitive Compensation
Like it or not, pay and benefits are a huge factor in staff turnover rates. If you don’t pay your employees well, lots of them will have no qualms looking around and finding another business that will.
To stop this happening you need to do your homework. Conduct market research on wages in your industry and investigate a competitive salary range based on similar positions in your area.
Praise People
While money is undoubtedly very important, employees also need recognition and encouragement to keep them motivated and make them feel appreciated. As a business owner or manager, showing them that you see their hard work is one of the single most important things you can do.
This doesn’t mean you have to run around the office showering everyone with thanks for every little thing that they do right, but when your employees do something that’s worthy of congratulations, it’s important that they hear it.
Making sure this happens will help to create a positive work environment in which people feel acknowledged, respected and motivated. People are a lot less likely to move on and seek greener pastures if they’re happy and feel valued where they are. Best of all, this method of turnover reduction is completely free. It just requires effective implementation.
Provide A Career Path
Employee stagnation is a leading cause of staff turnover. Most people want to increase their skill set and move up the career ladder, so showing them a clear career path can help to give them a sense of direction and purpose.
Show your employees how they can advance and give them information and feedback on how they can go about achieving this. Providing them with training and giving them opportunities to learn and practise new skills is also very important.
The bottom line is that motivated, engaged individuals that can envision a future with your company are much less likely to leave.
Allow Flexible Schedules
This is greatly dependent on the industry you’re in and the nature of your business, but if it’s possible to allow flexible work schedules then this can be another weapon in your fight against staff turnover. Doing so can allow your employees to create their own work-life balance. They’ll be able to pursue things beyond work, attend important appointments and take care of their family life.
It’s all about understanding that your staff have a life outside of your business. When they’re more easily able to take care of this, they’ll be more satisfied, less distracted and more productive when at work. They’ll also be much less likely to leave in order to find a better work environment.
Ultimately there will always be staff that want to leave your business. That’s just a fact of life. Whether it be a change in career path, starting a family or starting a business of their own, some kind of staff turnover is inevitable. What you can do is implement the steps outlined above to ensure that the cost and disruption it causes is kept to an absolute minimum.
When you do have staff that leave, at Skillforce we can help you quickly and easily find the right people to fill the vacant role.
Get in touch with us today to find out more about how we can help.