Great companies are run by great people. Without investing in hiring and retaining top talent, you won’t be able to achieve big dreams.
Retention has historically been a major concern of HR, and rightfully so: high turnover drains morale, hiring budgets, and available talent pools.
Want to keep your culture healthy, employer brand positive, and employees satisfied? Check out (and take advantage of!) our three tips for boosting employee retention.
1. Encourage communication
Want employees to give you their best? Make sure you want to hear it! From junior employees through the C-suite, make sure all of your employees know that their opinions are valuable.
Trust your new joiners
We can all get stuck in ruts, even if we don’t know it. New employees come into your organization with fresh eyes, and they might be able to spot inefficiencies and blockers that seem normal to you. Encourage your new joiners to give feedback. Who knows what you’ll learn?
Embrace 360 feedback
The Bob performance review module includes 360-degree reviews because everyone deserves feedback, especially managers. Empower employees to give feedback on their managers so they know their voices are heard, and your managers know how they can improve.
Talk about failure
Let employees know that communication will never be penalized. By removing the fear of negative consequences, you’ll encourage them to become more innovative in their jobs, less stressed, and more productive. IBM is an amazing example of how a willingness to experiment and accept failure created a billion-dollar business in three years.
Creating a culture where communication is encouraged from the start and making sure a candidate knows that they will immediately be heard in an organisation can be a game changer for them.
2. Give employees a sense of ownership
The endowment effect is a theory of behavioral economics positing that people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them. When applied to the workplace, it posits that creating ownership around projects for individual employees allows them to feel like they are playing an important role in the mission of the company. By attaching employee’s names to their projects, they’ll be more invested in achieving success.
Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Report predicts that the organization of the future structure will be based on work and projects, as opposed to business function and functional leaders. There are several organizations that are already structuring teams in this way, moving from departments to four-to-six person fast-moving cells.
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3. Prioritize employee recognition
The importance of employee recognition is well-known: it increases productivity, ownership, and retention.
Sterling Livingston’s Pygmalion in Management offers some insight into how manager’s perception of employees affects their productivity. If they are convinced that the people in their group are first-rate, they’ll reliably outperform a group whose manager believes the reverse – even if the innate talent of the two groups is similar. Creating positive expectations for employees in the first year will undoubtedly lead to their success; even the smallest of compliments instill confidence. Research has also shown that compliments prove to be the very best motivator for workers, not money.
You can become a company that is known as a great place to work by understanding the importance of recognition, and that:
“Individuals are never merely “hired hands” but bring along their heads and hearts: they enter the organization with individually shaped ideas, expectations, and agendas, and they bring with them distinctive values, interests, sentiments and abilities”
— W Richard Scott and Gerald F. Davis
You can improve your company’s retention
To increase retention, you don’t have to be a big name with big, funky offices. Investing in great culture and HR best practices will help your employees stay satisfied and with your organization.
