Did you know that it can cost twice as much to hire new employees compared to retaining current employees? One very effective way to improve your payroll is to focus on improved hiring, morale, and employee retention.
Some of these tips may cost money upfront, but they will help your company save money down the road. The longer your employees stay happy and stick around, the less money you must spend training new employees. An investment now in employee morale can pay off down the road.
Here are our top tips to improve hiring, employee retention, and employee morale.
Offer Competitive Benefits and Salary
Nearly half (45%/) of employees who quit their job do so to find a job with better benefits or salary. That means that paying competitive wages and offering excellent benefits will go a long way to retaining employees.
When it comes to benefits, think outside the box. Perhaps you could offer flex time, onsite babysitting, or the ability to bring your dog to work. Unique benefits like these give you a further edge against your competition to help you keep employees happy.
From time to time, you should research the salary and benefits your competitors are offering. Constantly tweak your offerings to attract and keep quality employees.
Reduce Employee Pain Points
Employees are people, not robots. Survey your employees regularly and look for common pain points. If you can address the most common complaints, you can keep your employees happy and wanting to stick around.
One common pain point is managing a work-life balance. Let's look at some suggestions on how to help your employees have a better work-life balance:
Encourage them to use their vacation time
Offer the chance to telecommute, at least occasionally
Have flexible schedules – as long as they're putting in their hours, let them choose those hours (up to a point/)
Offer to let employees who stay late one night to come in late the next morning
Anything you can do to show your employees that you're listening to and addressing their problems will make a difference.
Start by Hiring the Right Person with the Right Expectations
Nearly one third (31%/) of employees quit before they've been with a company for 6 months. How can you reduce this number?
First, you may need to refine your hiring process, so you only hire people who are likely to stick around. Another key is to make sure potential hires understand as much as possible about the job before you hire them. Employees who don't fully understand everything about their new job are more likely to quit than those who are informed.
Tweak Orientation and Onboarding
This is related to the last point. The more time you invest in employees from the start, the more likely they are to stick around. Orientation and onboarding should give a full overview of the job, answer any questions, and excite new employees.
Ensure Your Managers Are Leaders, Not Bosses
There are many crucial differences between a leader and a boss. Employees are much happier to work for leaders rather than bosses. Conflict with management is a common reason for employees to quit.
Here are 5 characteristics of effective leaders. Effective leaders:
Inspire confidence in their ability to steer the team in a good direction. Bad bosses breed frustration.
Share a clear direction for the future. Bad bosses leave their employees in the dark about where the company is headed.
Have a genuine desire to present high quality to both customers and employees.
Handle challenges themselves rather than passing off any trouble to other employees.
Believe in the importance of people and understand that their employees are their greatest asset.
Pair New Employees with Mentors
One way to help train new employees while inspiring seasoned employees is to have a mentorship system. New employees can feel more comfortable having a mentor to show them the ropes and include them in the group. Meanwhile, the new employee can offer a fresh perspective to veteran employees.
A mentor should be a peer rather than a supervisor. With that in mind, the mentor should inspire the new employee to want to grow within the organization.
Engage Your Employees
The more engaged employees are with their job and your company, the more likely they are to stick around. There are many ways to help keep your employees engaged:
Make advancement possible. Promote from within and encourage employees to strive for promotions rather than stay stagnant in their current position.
Make it clear how to advance within the company. Employees should always know how to get to the next step on the career ladder.
Show them the results of their hard work. The more specific you can be about telling your employees how their hard work helps the company, the better.
Provide many learning opportunities. This may include things like cross-training programs or the opportunity to be a mentor.
Become Known for Positive Things
Younger employees want to feel part of a team that is working toward a greater purpose. You can attract and keep these employees by becoming known for positive things. A few ways to do this include getting involved in things like:
The local community
Charities
A family-like work environment
Team building
Issues like education, the environment, or equality
Engaging in these types of things can help your employees feel like they're part of a solution to real problems.
Need a Loan to Jumpstart Your Employee Retention Efforts?
Some of our suggestions may require money upfront. As you have lower turnover rates, the upfront investment will pay off. That's because it costs more to hire new employees than it does to retain current employees.
First Union Lending can help. They have a wide variety of loan types. A lending specialist can help you find a loan to help you put some of our employee-retention tips into place.
Finding the right loan is easy. Click here or call us at 863-825-5626 to speak to one of our financial experts.