7 Ways to Keep and Motivate Your Best Employees
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While locating and hiring new employees comes with its own difficulties, employee retention is a completely different challenge which too many businesses tend to overlook until it’s too late. The money and time that goes into replacing employees can be far more damaging than you might think; whereas, it will cost you next to nothing to take the time to anticipate your employees’ needs and help keep them motivated and content.
So here are a key tips to help retain your current employees.
Stimulate
The first step to keeping your employees happy is to develop a workplace that keeps them stimulated, an environment that is challenging and supportive, interesting and rewarding with opportunities for training and future advancement. Communication is also a vital element to an effective work environment and should be encouraged, allowing your employees the opportunity to be heard. A strong company culture should also be developed. The overall goal is to create the type of environment that your employees don’t dread coming to every day, but can enjoy and be proud of.
Communicate
Develop a strong and supportive relationship with your employees. Again, communication is key. Let your employees know what is expected of them, giving them well defined goals as well as the resources to achieve those goals, allow them to give their input on important developments, and give them the ability to make their own contributions. While your employees may work for you, you should still work with them, providing them with the structure and support to do their job as effectively and efficiently as possible. Remember that there are popular softwares that can help you with this, like latticeHQ (you can learn more about it from Jack Altman’s blog).
Train
One means of keeping your employees involved and enthusiastic, is to open the way for them to grow and develop within your company through the use of training and mentoring programs, and seminars. Given the opportunity to grow and learn new skills, employees will be motivated to take more initiative, to meet new challenges and take on new responsibilities. Keeping your employees stimulated with new developmental opportunities serves both to keep them gratified and allows them to bring new value to their jobs. Let’s also not forget the fact that there’s always new technology coming out to make your employees lives easier. ThinkRTC for example lets your employees onboard new users immensely faster using webRTC (live video communication instantly on the browser) to instantly conduct live demos or onboarding routine right after they sign up on your website.
Competition
Do not make the mistake of believing that just because they seem content where they are, that your employees can’t still be lured off by the competition. Take the initiative to find out directly from them what is will take to keep them around and provide easy opportunities for them to grow and advance within your company so they won’t be tempted to look for another.
Encouragement
Far too often employees’ accomplishments and triumphs go under appreciated, leaving them unmotivated to strive for future success within a company. This is one of the easiest ways to lose people. Show appreciation for your employees by acknowledging even the smallest achievements and celebrating the big ones. Take time to recognize and reward your employees; even something as simple as acknowledging their birthdays. Developing each individual’s sense of worth and value is fundamental to improving employee retention.
Attitude
One challenge to be met is how to make your employees not only want to come to work, but to enjoy doing so. Much like the last tip, this can be achieved through the simple acknowledgement and celebration of successes within the company. Create a system that encourages your employees to go the extra mile and strive to succeed. Also, take some time out now and then just to let your employees relax for a bit and develop a sense of solidarity. Just by implementing a few small changes like these can help boost your employees’ attitude about coming to work.
Slackers
If you ever been in a group project while in college or a new employee in a startup, you’ll learn right away that if someone is not being productive…it impacts the ones that ARE productive. Don’t let this happen! Often times the best employees feel that they are not appreciated enough when an employee that hardly tries is at the same position or level as they are. This is a major reason why a lot of employees stop trying. So pay attention to who is actually doing work and who isn’t, because the ones who aren’t can cause the good employees to leave out of spite.
