Employee retention is a costly problem. When someone exits the company, other staffers must pick up their workload, which can lead to burnout and another set of people who may start looking for the doors. A poor retention track record also costs money when it comes to finding a replacement, sometimes as much as 30 percent of the position’s salary.
How to fix it?
How to keep everyone on board, happy and productive, forever and ever? You can’t, and any kind of retention plan that says so is more aspirational than real, and not of much value.
What you can do is find out why people are leaving, and then put the policies and procedures into place to keep that from happening. Here’s a few tried and true ways to keep your workforce intact:
- Clear advancement opportunities
- Continual vs. annual performance feedback
- Positive company culture
- Transparency from management around company goals and performance
- Professional development opportunities
- Diverse workforce
Hire the right people.
Getting it right from the outset means tapping into a recruitment process that intuitively seeks not just the qualified candidates on paper, but also those who bring a set of intangibles that make them a stellar fit for the organization you’ve built and are trying to grow.
How to do that?
For starters, consider working with a team whose mission all day, every day, is to create such recruitment platforms. Pairing up with professionals who can take a snapshot of your company now and create a hiring and onboarding system that will capture and retain the right people, is a smart move. Why not get rid of the retention headache before it even starts?