7 Ways to Retain Your Best Employees

In today’s competitive job market where employees are frequently changing jobs, it’s a must to make sure your company attracts and retains the best talent. Turnover is expensive and can wreak havoc on morale for your employees staying with the company, so you want to keep it to a minimum. Here are some ways to keep your best employees happy and on board for years to come.

• Give recognition – A little praise goes a long way. Create a positive work environment where employees are openly recognized for a job well done. This could be an official employee of the month award or a quarterly spotlight award. It could even be as simple as an email to your team recognizing someone who has gone the extra mile that week, or using a routine team conference call to acknowledge someone’s efforts.
• Offer work perks – Small benefits around the office, like free lunch once a month during a meeting, coffee in the breakroom or donuts on Fridays, can really help brighten your employees’ day and show you care. If you’re not sure what perks motivate your employees, send out a poll with a few choices and see what little rewards they would like around the office.
• Listen – If employees feel like they aren’t truly being heard by management, they can become frustrated. Provide employees the opportunity to give open and honest feedback of management and the company, without fear of retribution. Your employees can give you a boots-on-the-ground perspective of your company, and using their honest feedback can help you improve workplace morale and ensure smoother daily operations.
• Be flexible – Work-life balance is a high priority for many workers. Often, workers are juggling family obligations with their careers. If your type of work allows for options like telecommuting and flextime, offer those options. Generous leave plans also help retain quality employees balancing family with work.
• Promote from within – Employees will often hop jobs when they feel there is no room for advancement. Offer clear career paths for your employees and promote from within whenever possible so you can retain your top talent.
• Attack problems, not employees – Often when people make mistakes at work, the tendency is to point fingers publicly and play the blame game. Remember that we are all human, and we are bound to make mistakes. Rather than identifying the person who made the mistake, identify the mistake, how it was made, how to correct it and how to prevent it from happening again, without blaming or shaming employees. Fostering a solution-focused work environment will make employees feel more at ease and actually improve the quality of work.
• Offer competitive benefits – If you have competitive insurance packages, cost of living and performance-based raises, generous leave programs and other quality benefits, your employees are going to want to stick around. Investing in good benefits is far less expensive than turnover can be.

Of course, there are other creative ways you can help keep your best people around for the long haul. Contact The Marlo Company for more information.