The secret behind a successful employee retention strategy
If you’re experiencing a high rate of turnover among your employees, you might need a more successful retention strategy.
But a plan to keep your team happy, healthy, and engaged isn’t just for rainy days and high turnover situations.
Every business can benefit from a better employee retention strategy. Working on this can help you improve your culture, achieve better business results, and much more besides.
Because even if your IT recruitment process is perfect, if you can’t hold on to your talent afterwards, there’s little point in getting them through the door in the first place…
What is a retention strategy?
A retention strategy is the approach that an organisation uses to minimise attrition among its staff.
A good retention strategy includes fair remuneration, opportunities for development, recognition for hard work, a good company culture, and a supportive and engaging working environment.
Of course, any business will lose staff over time. People change careers, move to different areas, decide to start families.
But a successful retention strategy will help you minimise voluntary resignations where an employee moves to another employer for less positive reasons.
Why does a successful retention strategy matter?
Training your team is expensive. Team members who have already benefited from your efforts to develop them are an investment.
You can streamline your hiring process and make it more effective by using a specialist engineering and IT recruitment agency like Ernest Gordon.
But recruiting someone new is still going to be more costly than having an existing team member actually in their role working.
There are other major benefits of a retention strategy that works too:
Reduce workplace stress and burnout – making improvements to your workplace to improve retention will reduce any daily stress your team experiences.
Grow your employee satisfaction ratings – unhappy with your feedback on Glassdoor? A good retention strategy will have the side-effect of improving satisfaction too.
Build a better team dynamic and results – a happy team is almost always going to be a more productive team (as much as 20% by some studies).
The secret behind a successful brand retention strategy
The secret to a successful brand retention strategy is that it is cohesive.
Many business leaders concern themselves with only paying fair wages and are surprised when their high-pressure, low-valued work environment causes regular staff turnover.
Consider making all of the following a part of your employee retention strategy:
1) Pay a worthy salary (and benefits)
It isn’t the be-all and end-all, but you can’t avoid paying a decent salary when it comes to making your team feel valued.
What constitutes a salary that’s fair should take into account the hours your team actually work, the cost of living where you’re based, and should be updated in line with inflation.
Don’t overlook the value of benefits like medical cover either. Especially in a world like today’s when the cost of living continues to rise.
2) Improve your environment
Is your office a place where your team wants to spend time? Can they find a quiet place to work if they need to? Do you offer remote working and flexible working arrangements?
It’s not uncommon for IT startups to recruit top talent for web developer jobs (for example) with “extras” like a beer-stocked workplace fridge. Only for the office itself to be a noisy, stressful place that results in high turnover.
Get the basics right if you want to foster the good working environment a happy team needs.
3) Check your culture
Almost 50% of the people we come across in the engineering and IT recruitment process say they left their last job because of the culture.
Take a step back and see how your team interacts, how your managers treat their team, if your values are actually lived, and everything else that forms the basis of a good company culture.
4) Provide opportunities for growth
Feeling stuck in a career dead-end (even a relatively pleasant one) is another reason otherwise content employees move on.
Look for opportunities to help your people expand their skills and experience if you want them to stay engaged.
5) Recognise hard work
Companies where working overtime for no additional pay and sudden deadline shifts are common will experience higher than average staff turnovers.
All businesses need to recognise and sometimes reward hard work (even social recognition can be highly valued) on their journey to mastering the secrets of a successful retention strategy.
Want to start hiring top talent you can retain long into the future?
Let’s talk. Ernest Gordon is a specialist engineering and IT recruitment agency. We give you access to the best professionals from an extensive talent pool.
Set up a cost and commitment-free chat with one of our experts to discuss your talent needs today.