10 Ways To Enhance Employee Retention Rates: Efficient Employee Engagement
Whether you are running a Fortune 500 or a startup, your primary goal is boosting your employee productivity and business ROI. How an employee thinks about his or her workplace and work culture are key points that help a company function successfully. Engaged workforces are more efficient and tend to stay with the same company for a long and likely refer their friends, thereby enhancing your hiring efforts. Thus, employers need to encourage their employees to outshine themselves, boost them to engage effectively and ensure employees’ work-life balance.
Employers and team managers must maintain retention rates high to keep consistency and accelerate business growth. If your employees aren’t staying for long, your company will find it hard to excel at long-term projects.
Research says that employee retention is one of the biggest challenges that every business faces today. Moreover, companies and new opportunities are booming every day. With the new normal of remote work, employees have more options to pick out potential employers if they are not happy with the current one. Thus, it is essential for management to develop strategies to encourage employee engagement and enhance employee retention.
Why employee retention is important?
Retaining an existing employee vs. hiring someone new. Which one is better? Everyone would agree that retaining the old is much better. Because hiring a right-fit employee is a time-consuming process where the employer and the HR team have to take a lot of effort and resources on onboarding, provide training and help them to adjust the company culture. Thus, companies need to ensure that they retain as many employees for as long as possible.
Often, businesses go to great lengths to hire the right-fit candidate; once employed, the employer should make sure that employees won’t leave.
The employee retention rate is often measured by the percentage of employees who stay with the company for a year. Though most enterprises prefer to calculate retention rates yearly, measuring the rate in short periods can lead to quicker results.
Differentiating employee engagement and employee retention
Employee retention and employee engagement levels are two significant factors that companies often struggle to influence. Executing employee engagement and retention strategies through enhanced talent management is the best way to build an engaged and effective workforce.
Employee engagement is all about creating an encouraging work atmosphere where the employee feels enthusiastic and capable of completing their work productively. It is the company’s technique that results in an emotional commitment of employees towards the company. Once attained, employees tend to be satisfied with their work and never decide to quit his job. An engaged employee is ready to take any responsibilities and looks forward to a long-term association with the company.
Alternatively, employee retention talks about a company’s proficiency to keep their current employees by leveraging employee engagement as a retention tool. The employee retention initiative aims to create an atmosphere where employees feel supported and prefer to stay with the company. Employee retention depends on various factors, such as work flexibility, work satisfaction, benefits, professional growth, work culture etc.
Employee Retention is the goal. Employee Engagement is one of the ways to achieve this goal.
Gallup's study says that disengaged employees have dragged down productivity between $450 billion and $550 billion in the US. (Source: Forbes)
Employee retention and engagement are broad and challenging topics. Companies can benefit in various ways if they implement better employee retention strategies.
Ten proven ways to inspire employee engagement and boost employee retention rates
- Create an exceptional and easy onboarding experience
Onboarding is the best time to connect new hires with their work, team, objectives, and company’s mission and vision. It will give help employees feel like they are a part of your company. A survey conducted by Robert Half says that around 59 % of professionals polled have experienced a bad onboarding process. A good onboarding process will help your new employees learn more about the job and work culture and give them ideas about completing their tasks and goals.
In this covid-19 era, most companies have started adopting remote work and hence the recruitments. Be it virtual or in person, the training and support you deliver as soon as a new employee onboard will enhance employee engagement and boost retention.
Read More- How to create smooth and successful onboarding experience to your remote employees?
2. Provide professional development opportunities
As per the statistics of Linkedin Talent Blog, around 45 % of people left their previous job due to the lack of opportunities for professional development. Supporting professional development and constant learning improves your employees and increases retention. Encourage your workforce to stay at your organization by delivering a perfect career path for promotion and development. You can also educate your staff by providing training with microlearning courses. It will help employees to stay innovative, engaged and productive.
3. Recognize employee achievements
Businesses that engage exceptionally tend to recognize the workforces for a job well done. Employee recognition is necessary to a company’s retention efforts. It's essential to recognize and appreciate employees for the hard work and efforts they have contributed to your organization. This will help employees to stay motivated to work hard, complete tasks and goals more productively. Moreover, they will be satisfied with your company and job. Several organizations provide formal rewards systems for employees who have contributed better results to the company.
4. Provide the right tools and resources
Giving instant access to the right tools and software help employees perform their tasks efficiently. The manager must evaluate the requirements of his teammates and work to diminish inefficiencies. Providing the right tools will help employees do their work with ease and boost productivity and business ROI.
5. Work-life balance
During this pandemic period, remote work has become the new normal. A healthy work-life balance is fundamental to every organization as it can improve the well-being of their teams and let them focus better on their work.
The reports of Empuls state that around 87% of workforces expect their business owners to offer flexible work hours to balance their work and life. Work-life balance is essential to keep up productivity and reduce stress levels and hindrance. Employees who experience too much work pressure are more likely to leave the job.
6. Initiate employee training and development programs
Employee training and development programs play a critical role in our day-to-day life as technology transformed the way we work. The statistics of Emplify say that 70% of employees prefer to leave their companies that can’t invest in employee training and development programs. It means employees always choose to excel themselves in all field by gaining new knowledge and experience. Initiating employee training programs in your organizations will be beneficial for both employers and employees.
7. Encourage teamwork
Employers should encourage their entire workforce to contribute their ideas and suggestions regarding the organization's overall functioning. Managers of each team have to boost teamwork by making opportunities for collaboration and communication, accepting each employee's work styles, and giving them the freedom to make decisions and required changes.
8. Ask for feedback
Feedback is a great tool to gain an insight into how your workforce feels about their job, environment and the company. A company that hardly pays attention to its workforce will produce disengaged employees. Feedback from employees will help you to know about their professional goals. It is an opportunity for an employer to improve their company.
9. Effective collaboration
The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the relevance of workplace communication. Team managers have to maintain positive and valuable communication within the entire team, including onsite and remote employees. It would be best if you connected with each employee regularly.
10. Provide the organization’s goal
The entire employees must be aware of the organization’s prime goal and work to achieve that goal. The goal should encourage all workforce to share and train in their regular tasks.
Conclusion
No matter which industry your organization belongs to, employee retention should be on the top of the priority lists of your HR department. The employees are the revenue driver for every business. Thus, employers and the HR department should create an employee-centric work culture, which delivers a positive work atmosphere to retain their top workforces.
Automated Employee Service Desk to Enhance Employee Retention Rates
Enhancing employee retention rates and experiences has become the key focus for all organizations around the world. The ten strategies mentioned above combined with AI-powered employee service desks can help you retain your top talent within the company. An automated service desk provides various benefits such as quick responses, decrease errors, enhance user communications, boost job satisfaction etc.
Rezolve.ai is a modern service desk platform with advanced features that offers instant employee support, better employee experience and engagement for enhanced productivity.
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