Why should you focus on Employee Retention

Retaining your top talent is of utmost concern. Here we offer you some advice on how to keep your most valuable business asset: your employees.

Aviahire
Aviahire
5 min readJun 18, 2020

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Employee Retention

What is Employee Retention

Business Dictionary defines employee retention as

“an effort by a business to maintain a working environment which supports current staff in remaining with the company.”

In today’s market, there is fierce competition to attract top talent by offering them competitive benefits, which makes it essential that your company retains its top talent and skilled employees from quitting.

The need for Employee Retention

Hiring ain’t cheap

There are numerous costs associated when it comes to hiring a new candidate like advertising the job posting, inhouse recruiter’s salaries, third-party recruiters fees, travel expenses, sign-on bonuses, and employee referral programs. To prevent the company from these costs the company needs a strategic Employee Retention strategy.

The employee might join a competitor

When an employee resigns, they are most like to join the competitors. In such cases, the individual who is aware of the present organization’s strategies, delicate information, and company statistics there are chances that they might reveal these secrets or knowingly or unknowingly apply the same strategy to the new organization.

A new employee takes time to adjust

When a new employee replaces an existing employee adjustment problems crop up. Both the new joinee and the existing employees of the company take time to strike a rapport and get comfortable with each other. It is a human tendency to compare a new joinee with the previous employee and always find faults in the joinee which might hamper the productivity of the team and thus the company.

Challenges in Employee Retention

High salary expectation

Every employee has high salary expectations and this is one of the major reasons, why an employee quits the organization. Retention becomes a problem when an employee quotes for an exceptionally high salary, which is beyond the budget of the organization.

Job opportunities available

With the cut-throat competition in the market every company tries to allure the top and best talent from their competition by offering them lucrative offers which are often hard to resist making the retention a tough task

No job rotation

Humans hate to become monotonous, especially talented ones. These bunch of talented employees might find the job good and interesting in the starting phase, but soon they are in a constant search of opportunity and challenges and if the organization fails to do so, then such employees might look for other avenues

Employee Retention Strategy

Correct salary and benefits

A recent Glassdoor survey of people in recruitment, HR, and hiring managers found that for 45% of employees who quit, the top reason is salary. This reason was followed by career advancement opportunities, better benefits, and location. But when it comes to generation X only 24% of “Generation X” employees say that financial stability motivates them to stay in a job. Yet 56% of employees say that health care and insurance concerns keep them in their job.

After seeing these statistics, the company should consider benefits and salary important especially if you are paying below industry standards and restructure your them in order to retain your employees

Mentoring Programs

A well-aligned mentoring program increases employee retention by creating tighter bonds among seasoned employees and junior team members. This has been especially popular at organizations with lots of millennial employees, and rightly so; a 2016 study by Deloitte concluded that millennials planning to stay with their current employer for at least five years were twice as likely to have a mentor than not. Mentoring increases employee engagement throughout the organization which leads to improved employee retention

Training and development

Helping employees achieve their short-term and long-term goals is one of the most crucial employee retention strategies. Therefore, designing in-house training programs for employees can advance their professional development. Other methods include paying them to attend conferences, industry events, etc. gives the employees a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that their company cares for his professional development.

Feedback on a monthly or quarterly basis

Conducting employee surveys and monthly or quarterly feedback to employees can help them to get more involved in the company and increase productivity. Feedbacks make it easier for employees to understand and track their goals, responsibilities. The management should make sure that the feedback given to the employees is not vague and covers the required professional as well as personal attributes to help them stay and develop in the company.

Benefits of Employee Retention

Cost-saving

Recruitment is expensive as the company has to pay for the recruiter’s fees, their travel expenses, and extra miscellaneous amount but when you retain your employee this cost for the company is waived off. This money can be used to invest in the upcoming or existing business of the company, building brand of the company or for the betterment of your employees

Loyalty

Longstanding members of staff are inevitably more loyal than new starters. They are likely to believe in your business and want the best for business while having a developed positive working relationship with peers and managers. All this can make them much easier to motivate — a happy member of staff will proactively want to do a good job.

Performance and attitude are already judged

As the existing employee has already been working for the company he has already built a rapport with his colleagues and peers. The management and also his team are aware of his attitude and performance because of which the management assigns appropriate task and target to that employee saving them a lot of time and effort

Increases overall productivity

As per the Talent Management & HR survey, it takes 1–2 years for an employee to reach the level of productivity which is expected from the organization. Thus, more time the employee spends in the organization, more productive and more responsible he becomes towards the company

Quality of work

Employees who leave the company often create a gap in the process, this creates troubles in managing daily tasks that affect the quality of work. Other employees might feel overburdened and exploited by this amount of work. Thus employee retention becomes advantageous to ensure the quality of work.

It is important for the company to understand that employee retention is worthy of its focus and continuous improvement. If you can retain people longer, you can get more traction, advance understanding, develop deep expertise, build institutional wisdom, and gain critical momentum.

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