The importance of staff retention
Although a moderate level of staff turnover can be good for a business, every organization needs to have a strategy in place to retain high performers that give it a competitive edge.
The cost of not doing so can be severe as high employee turnover can be very costly: lowering internal morale, harming the company’s external reputation and losing it business.
The first plank in this strategy is to try to understand more about the reasons why people are resigning.
There may be positive reasons such as an attractive new job or a chance to reshape their lifestyle by working on projects outside of mainstream work. However, more likely is that their departure signifies some dissatisfaction with the present job.
Main reasons people leave a job
According to research the most common negative reasons for leaving a job are:
- Poor salary and benefits
- A lack of training and development opportunities
- Dissatisfaction with management
- Unfriendly colleagues
- Horrendous journey
- Lack of work/life balance
While companies do conduct ‘Exit’ interviews to try and ascertain the reasons behind a departure, because of the necessity to obtain a decent reference, people often tone down or completely fabricate their reasons for leaving. However, analysing the data can provide valuable feedback to improve staff retention. Indeed, it might also be worthwhile using staff retention as a Key Performance Indicator within your business.
Ascertain why are your staff leaving?
Methods to find out why staff are leaving include:
- Confidential attitude surveys.
- Questionnaires sent to former employees around six months after their departure.
- Exit interviews
Ways to improve staff retention
Improved staff retention should be the result of adopting a mix of the following:
- Ensure those being recruited have a more realist idea of what the job entails.
- Improved career development opportunities.
- Effective appraisals
- Strong diversity policies.
- A practicable means of dealing with bullying.
- A good work/life balance.
- A mechanism for staff to register dissatisfaction, whether it be appraisals, grievance proceeding and so on.
- Leadership training for managers.
The ultimate aim should be to make every employee feel valued and proud of the work that they do. To develop a work culture that encourages diversity and creativity. There should also be effective anti-discrimination policies in place that promote flexible working, where possible.
Adopting a strategy for staff retention is not easy but it will greatly benefit your organisation.