Creating an effective employee retention program may help to keep your best employees longer. Here’s how to get started.

Regardless of how much employees are paid, or how well they enjoy their jobs, some turnover is unavoidable. Since it’s so difficult, and costly, for organisations to be able to find and recruit top talent, leaders need to find new ways to minimise turnover.

One of the best solutions is to create a more effective employee retention program for your organisation. Here are a few important points to consider when you’re creating that program.

Offer the right training 

Many companies invest a lot of time and money into developing an initial training program for their new hires, and then provide little follow-up.  Once a job candidate is hired and becomes part of the team, leaders should continue providing their employees with opportunities to learn new skills and face growing challenges.

Employee engagement and morale thrive when we give our people meaningful work.  Keep your people invested in high performance by allowing them to keep their current jobs while cross-training in other departments.

Offering special assignments allows you to take advantage of the insight, creativity and fresh perspective that employees bring from their experiences in different departments. In the long run, your employee’s quality of work will increase because they are constantly being inspired and encouraged to learn something new!

Boost internal hiring 

Another reason why an organisation’s best people leave is that they don’t feel like they can “get ahead,” by remaining with the company. They feel trapped in their current roles, so they look outside the organisation for opportunities to achieve greater success.

Encourage your employees to remain committed to your organisation by adopting a formal policy of promoting from within. Be prepared to make some changes to your organisation’s culture so you’ll be successful at identifying more internal candidates for promotion.

For starters, to be considered for a top post in the c-suite, lateral moves within an organisation have traditionally been frowned upon and seen as a sign of weakness rather than strength. To encourage greater internal hiring, CEOs and other leaders need to place equal value and recognition on these career moves, rather than penalising employees who have not followed a straight, upward climb.

Mid-level managers are also known to be reluctant to share their best employees because they fear their department will suffer if they lose the talent and insight of their top employees. To combat this roadblock, leadership must cultivate a greater desire for co-operation, collaboration, mutual respect and trust throughout their organisation.

Become more flexible 

Every human being has an innate desire for freedom and autonomy. We work at our best when we feel we have some control over our work and lives. To meet this need, leaders need to grant their team as much autonomy as possible in the way that they work.

When we think about increasing flexibility, we tend to think about offering flexible shifts, extended vacations and time away from work. We become open to offering more opportunities for employees to work from home or complete tasks while on the go.

True corporate flexibility, the kind that builds loyalty and responsibility in your workforce, is about more than vacation time and alternating schedules.  Along with greater autonomy, leaders need to grant their employees greater authority.

Employees need to be empowered to make decisions and take action at every level of their organisation. They need to be offered greater opportunities to provide honest feedback about how well the organisation is meeting their needs. They need to be asked for insight into what steps leadership can take to make it even easier for them to perform their jobs to the highest standards.

Offer fair compensation 

In the leadership and management space, a lot of attention is given to the impact that can be made on employee morale and engagement by offering perks, rewards and public recognition for a job well done. While it’s true that these incentives can boost morale and encourage greater engagement, this only works if the employee’s rate of pay is fair and comparable to local market values.

Using special rewards and perks in place of fair compensation is simply not just, and your employees know it even if they fail to complain about it to their leaders.

If you want to be able to retain your best employees, you must offer fair compensation. This one step encourages loyalty, respect and greatly improves the chances that your employees will want to remain with your company.

Need help putting your retention program together? Get in touch with our wonderful team at Empowering Ambitious Women. We can help develop the ideal program for your workplace.