When you hire an employee on any level, your company invests plenty of time and money in training and other important areas. Should that employee leave after only a short period of time, you’re back to square one. When this happens over and over, it not only impacts your company’s bottom line but also customer service and even employee morale. If you want to retain employees for the long term, here are five tips to keep in mind.
Have a Diverse and Inclusive Workplace
First, always have a workplace that emphasizes diversity and inclusion. In today’s world, that means balancing out your workforce with employees of different races, cultures, and backgrounds. When doing so, always make sure your company embraces the differences among its workforce since this will allow for the expression of innovative ideas and allow a wider variety of workers to obtain promotions into upper-level positions.
Encourage Feedback
Employees often leave jobs where they feel as if nobody is listening to them. To prevent this, encourage feedback from your employees, and then be willing to implement some of their best ideas into your day-to-day operations. By doing so, this proves you are listening to them, which will help morale and improve productivity.
Engage with Your Employees
Even if you are the CEO of a multi-million dollar company, don’t underestimate the importance of employee engagement in terms of retention. By getting out of the office now and then and spending a day interacting with front-line employees, you can not only show you care about them as individuals but also get a firsthand look at what’s working well and what areas may need improvements.
Provide Growth Opportunities
Remember, hardly anyone loves to stay in a dead-end job year after year. Eventually, employees who work hard for your company will want the chance for career advancement. One of the best things you can do to make employee retention easier is to promote from within whenever possible. If employees know they have a clear career path with your company, chances are they will stick around.
In-Depth Exit Interviews
Finally, always conduct in-depth exit interviews with employees who do leave your company. This will let you find out the real reason why your employee is leaving, what their new employer offered them that maybe your company did not, and give you the tools needed to make changes in the future to keep good employees in the fold. Employee retention is never easy, especially when the job market is strong. However, if you implement the five tips mentioned here, chances are you will have a workforce with more and more long-term employees.
Lizzie Weakley is a freelance writer from Columbus, Ohio. In her free time, she enjoys the outdoors and walks in the park with her husky, Snowball.
