Best Practices to Retain Employees

Talent recruitment and retention are universal problems faced by today’s organisations. Regardless of size, companies are experiencing more employee churn than they’ve seen in the recent past. Also, talent retention is a critical factor for the long-term health and success of any business. These days HR leaders are challenged with identifying and implementing incentives and best practices to attract and retain top talent.

Organizations concerned with the growing skilled and labour shortage are searching for ways to create a work environment that will motivate employees to become highly engaged and invest more of themselves in their work. In the quest for highly- engaged workplaces, organizations have been focusing on adopting a learning-driven approach to attract and retain talent.

This trend is growing and there are more unique ways of identifying and assessing skills and competencies, including a number of tools designed to align employee capabilities with available opportunities and to identify skill gaps. To meet growing demand for skilled talent, the focus of many organisations has shifted to skill improvement, alignment, and assessment.

The problem of retention

Historically, organizations in India have not been able to offer employees work that is challenging enough to retain them in one job for a long period of time. On an average, engineers change job every two to three years because organizations fail to provide quality work based on individual team member’s competencies and aspirations. Retaining employees in the engineering sector has been a major factor in an organization’s ability to meet project completion goals and maintain a high level of work quality.

So what can businesses do to retain employees? Here are five best practices for increasing employee satisfaction (and retaining your most valued employees).

1. Engage Employees By Offering Upskilling Opportunities

Training and right job opportunities to upskill your existing employees reinforces their sense of importance in the organisation. Through training, employers help employees achieve goals and ensure they have more than a solid understanding of their job requirements. Upskilling provides a path for employees to challenge themselves and move up within the company. Career development training helps prepare your existing employees for new roles in organizations where needs are constantly evolving due to automation and changes in business focus.

Organisations should stop assuming that all employees want the same things. Employees are motivated differently. By listening, instead of assuming, organizations and team leaders can start decoding what matters to employees and begin creating individualized development plans to help them achieve personal and professional goals.

2. Communicate Availability of Rewards and Compensation Packages

Quality of work, career growth and better compensation are the top three reasons for employees to switch jobs. Rewards and compensation are important factors for generating employee satisfaction. Make sure you’re communicating your rewards and benefit packages more frequently than just during the onboarding or offboarding phases. Be sure your employees know the benefits available to them and encourage them to take advantage of the benefits offered. In addition to updating your teams during benefits renewal periods, include reminders about profit sharing, bonus programs, pension and health plans, paid time off, tuition reimbursement, and even outplacement benefits to send a powerful message to employees that you care about their well-being.

3. Connect Employees and Senior Management

Good relationships with superiors is key to employee satisfaction. There are many studies that show the reasons people leave organizations are often related to their relationships with their managers. Set expectations that managers meet with direct reports at regular intervals. To make those conversations more productive, have a process that includes honest feedback from employees and an opportunity to ask questions.

A strong retention strategy includes communication from company leadership and reinforcement from management. Provide multiple channels for employees to communicate to leadership and vice versa. When organisations are constantly focused on the vicious circle of employee hiring and searching for potential new talent, they lose out on the benefits of improving engagement to retain talent and risk continued employee churn.

Organisations that spend more time on people engagement help cut down time they spend on talent acquisition.