Employee retention has a direct impact on your enterprise’s business performance and success in both the short and long term. That’s why leaders across your organization — not just your CEO and CEO, but also your CHRO, talent acquisition director, and departmental leaders — need to work closely with one another to keep your high-performing team members.

All you have to do is regularly evaluate of your work environment (e.g., workers’ career growth aspirations and job satisfaction, general employee morale, etc.), and you’ll put your business in the best possible position to retain employees for the long haul.

5 ways to improve employee retention (and prevent top talent from leaving your org)

There isn’t just one area you and your C-suite should hone in one to build highly effective employee retention strategies. Rather, to develop a strong employee retention program, your company must account for workforce sentiment, wants/needs, and career development goals.

Consider recent research from laptop and accessories brand Targus.

That represents an 11-point rise from the year before.

Beyond prioritizing flexible/work-from-home policies, there are facets of your business like employee engagement levels and whether your staff members have a healthy work-life balance that ultimately impact your retention (and, thereby, your employee turnover) efforts.

So, that begs the question: Where can you and your executive team get started? Here’s some expert advice and insights that can help your enterprise optimize your employee retention strategy today.

1) Define what exactly employee retention means

This may sound odd. Everyone at your org understands why employee retention matters.

That being said, not all members of your workforce (or even your leadership team) may know how retention is defined at your business, as there are nuanced versions of it from one org to the next.

• Does employee retention mean keeping everyone who works at the business for at least one year, or is the ideal target retention date much longer?
• Are only certain types of employees (e.g., full-time/permanent workers vs. entry-level/temporary staff members) accounted for in your retention rate?
• Is there “segmentation” with your particular employee retention rate (e.g., executive-level vs. mid-level vs. entry-level and/or by business unit)?

Before you can start to create an action plan to rectify your retention issues and encourage your employees to stick around for the foreseeable future, discuss these (and any other relevant) questions to ensure all business stakeholders involved in improving retention are on the same page.

2) Make sure your recruitment process is solid

Your recruitment process is the first opportunity you have to engage potential new employees and express what it’s like to work for your company. Thus, it needs to be a well-oiled machine.

If your recruitment process is disorganized, dysfunctional, inefficient, or otherwise off-putting to prospective hires, it will be difficult to convince candidates that your company is any different.

Of course, it’s not just on talent acquisition to impart how great it is to work at your business and answer all questions posed by candidates so they feel comfortable accepting an offer.

Hiring managers play a pivotal role in setting the table, so to speak, to define what they’re looking for in new hires, how their team typically operates, and what they do to empower their direct reports to thrive in the near and long term (e.g., regular 1:1 checkins, career-pathing discussions).

3) Onboard new employees efficiently and effectively

The onboarding process is crucial for employee retention. This is the time when new employees are learning how to operate in your organization, being trained and finding footing in their roles, taking on new responsibilities, and getting their first experiences as an employee with your company culture.

If they have a positive onboarding experience, they’re more likely to stay with the company long-term.

The most successful HR teams have clear and comprehensive onboarding objectives. They include:

• Easy access to new hire paperwork (eSignature capabilities are table stakes for orgs today)
• Onboarding checklists for new hires to refer to as they move through the onboarding process
• An intro to the company’s mission, vision, and values as an extension of employer branding
• Facilitating intros to departmental colleagues to begin team-building and spur collaboration
• Offering resource centers for “everything you need to know” starting on Day 1 and beyond
• Beginning the learning development process and making training available to interested workers
• Providing a resource center for all questions a new hire may have (co-owned by HR and managers)
• A clear roadmap of a 30-60-90 day plan for all new employees so they can hit the ground running

Ensuring that new workers who join your business catch on to how things are done and assimilate with your company culture is paramount to their success in your org.

4) Communicate with your workforce regularly

Open communication with your internal team, as well as the candidate, is essential for employee retention. Employees who feel unsure of what they’ll be walking into within their new company or have uncertainties about what’s expected of them are more likely to look for opportunities elsewhere.

When seeking to create both positive candidate and new-employee experiences, communication is key. No prospective or recent hire likes to be kept in the dark.

Unfortunately, many recruiters and employers treat hiring and onboarding as a one-way street, requiring prompt answers and updates from candidates without offering the same thing in return.

Make sure you communicate early and often with late-stage job candidates, those you extend offers to, and those you ultimately hire to keep them in the loop on company news, changes, and developments and ensure they understand what their people manager and your C-suite expect from them.

Writing for Fast Company, Ragan Communications CEO Diane Schwartz said many leading enterprises are hiring for the role of “communicator” to listen to the wants, needs, complaints, and questions of their workforce and be proactive in sharing organizational info to these employees.

A communicator is the “heart and soul of the workplace” and “secret ingredient to employee retention.”

“There has never been a time quite like this for communicators to leverage their unique position as chief storyteller and brand protector to co-create a better workplace experience that makes quiet quitting and the great resignation lowercase words with lower impact,” said Diane.

5) Offer competitive pay and perks to employees

Employees who feel they’re being paid fairly, have good benefits, and can easily access career development options (e.g., your L&D programs, internal mobility paths) are likely to stick around.

Simply put, many employees today are no longer accepting lagging wages and weak benefits packages from companies — and they’re still in a strong position to get what they want.

To ensure the salary, bonuses, benefits, and perks you offer to employees are seen as strong and, thus, will help keep them around — have your HR team conduct regular “retention interviews.”

Let’s say your retention interviews reveal a strong desire to upskill and reskill. The BCG quartet noted that, if you “show current employees that you value them even more than potential new hires by providing them with new opportunities to grow and advance,” they’re much more likely to stay.

Senior-level changes like these to your business have a trickle-down effect. For instance, the introduction of new L&D programs gives your talent acquisition team the ability to relay said programs in job postings on your career site and published to job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed.

At the end of the day, if you want to retain the top talent at your org, make sure you’re offering competitive salaries and benefits — something you can ensure you do by comparing your pay and perks offerings to other companies looking to hire high-performing talent.

Enhance your talent attraction and retention efforts with Jobvite. Schedule a demo today to learn all about Evolve, our unified Talent Acquisition Suite for enterprises like yours.

The post Employee Retention: How to Better Retain Your Workforce first appeared on Jobvite.

The true cost of employee turnover involves much more than just recruiting-related expenses. In fact, when an employee leaves, it can cost from one-half to two times that worker’s annual salary to replace them. That’s because losing a team member includes added costs like:

• Advertising the position your company now must backfill
• Onboarding the eventual person who accepts the offer
• Lost productivity during the time the role remains open

When you consider that voluntary attrition ranges from 12% to a whopping 60% annually (depending on your industry), it’s clear that the cost of employee turnover can quickly get out of hand.

With Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing business professionals who work across sectors and at companies of all sizes continue to exit their orgs — for reasons ranging from a lack of career development, to a poor opinion on their company culture, to insufficient pay — it’s more important than ever for large-scale companies like yours to drive down turnover and boost retention.

Calculating the cost of employee turnover 

Before exploring ways you can reduce employee turnover at your org in the months and years ahead, let’s first examine what goes into the actual cost of replacing an employee for most companies today.

Unfortunately, the real cost of turnover is difficult to measure, because most businesses lack the cohesive systems needed to track relevant metrics across various departments like HR, finance, and operations. That said, there are several tangible numbers that you should keep in mind: 

1. Hiring costs: Recent research from SHRM shows the average cost of hiring a new, full-time employee is around $4,700. If you offer signing bonuses and relocation packages, be sure to include them in your calculation. 
2. Temporary employees and overtime: You may need to allocate additional budget to hiring temporary workers or paying overtime to fill the gap left by departing employees.  
3. Training costs: New employees often require specialized training to learn their job. TrainingMag research puts the average cost per learner at $986. But, don’t forget hidden costs, like shipping materials to remote employees. 
4. Time to full productivity: This is a pretty simple calculation based on average ramp-up time. If it takes the average new employee three months to fully onboard, the cost is 25% of their annual pay, six months is 50% of annual pay, and so on. 

For budgeting purposes, you can either calculate this cost for each position or role, or determine the average cost across your org. Either way, the number will likely surprise you. However, it should also provide strong motivation to ensure valued employees want to stay with your company long term.

In other words? With greater insight into the actual cost of losing members of your workforce — whether they’re FTEs, contractors, or hourly employees — you will have a strong incentive to work with your HR and talent teams as well as people managers to develop a game plan.

Specifically, a plan to a) address team morale and dissatisfaction issues with your staff, and b) craft a recruiting and training strategy to find and onboard new hires who fill vacancies quickly and efficiently.

Reasons for employee turnover

Conventional wisdom says that employees change jobs to increase their pay. That’s not always the case.

While compensation (e.g., low salary, few employee benefits and perks, no stock options or 401(k) match) does often play a part in the decision to leave a job, research continues to show that pay is not the most important driver. Other factors — including communication, leadership, workplace environment, and a lack of appreciation for their work — are cited far more often.

Compensation is also an important consideration (54%), followed by benefits (49%) and flexible schedules (33%). An overarching theme of turnover in recent years is also workers’ desire for employee development programs to reskill and upskill and take on new roles.

All of these stats lead to one clear conclusion: employee turnover is largely preventable. In fact, a study by the Work Institute found that more than three-quarters of professionals who left a job voluntarily could have been retained by employers.

The keys to doing so are clear: Provide career opportunities, create a great workplace, and make employees feel valued. You may have to invest some money, but you’ll end up saving in the long run.

How to reduce employee turnover 

Depending on the size of your org, employee turnover may be costing you tens of thousands of dollars each year. Sure, you could simply divert this cash into employees’ bank accounts.

However, your business would be far better off investing your collective time, resources, and energy to make your employees want to be part of your business for years to come.  

With that in mind, here are five areas to focus on as you work to limit employee turnover.

1) Employer brand

Your employer brand refers to the way your company is perceived by both prospective customers and job candidates. In terms of your TA efforts, it’s the way you differentiate yourself to potential hires.

It’s important to establish an authentic and consistent employer brand in the marketplace, to ensure that job seekers understand who you are as a company, how you treat your employees, and whether your values align with their own — leading to fewer surprises once they’ve been hired.  

2) Onboarding

It’s no secret that a significant percentage of new hires leave within the first year, or even the first six months. If you want employees to stick with your company, you need to set them up for success.

An effective onboarding program will help new employees acclimate to the company, their team, and their responsibilities — ultimately leading to a better experience. You may have to get creative with onboarding in today’s remote environment, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

3) Internal mobility

Giving employees an opportunity to grow within your company is a win-win. For employers, it turns your workforce into a robust talent pipeline. And for employees, it increases job satisfaction and creates an incentive to stay with your company for the long term.

But, building a dedicated internal mobility program takes more than good intentions.

4) Employee engagement and culture

As we mentioned earlier, workplace environment is one of the top drivers of employee turnover. Creating a culture that keeps employees engaged takes some effort, but it doesn’t have to be expensive. Even little changes can make a big difference.

Keep in mind, your company’s values have just as much impact on culture as free snacks and ping-pong tables. A recent LinkedIn study revealed that 86% of millennials would take a pay cut to work for an employer who shares their values. 

5) Technology

Employees expect a simple, intuitive, and seamless experience at work that fosters creativity, enhances productivity, and encourages collaboration. Using top tools at your org leads to increased job satisfaction for employees. (Extra points if you seek their preference of work computer.)

While your C-suite and HR team focus on reducing turnover, your talent team needs leading tech to attract, engage, and convert qualified candidates. Learn how Jobvite can help.

The post The Real Cost of Employee Turnover (And How to Prevent It) first appeared on Jobvite.