While employers have gotten overly picky in recent years, employees are not far behind. Younger employees, who have increasingly come to be known as ‘’the job-hopping millennials’’ approach employment differently than anyone else.
While previous generations were happy to take a job with reasonable pay and settle in, millennials have a list of things they require from employment, over and above money. Human resource managers then find themselves walking a tightrope between organizational policies and appeasing new hires.
While a degree of exit is okay, even healthy for the company, a high turnover reflects poorly on both the HRM and the company.
Here are a few things you can do to improve your employee retention rate.
1. Find the Right Match
Your hiring processes can determine whether employees will stay and grow within your company or will alight at the first stop.
A key reason why employees leave is a skills mismatch. The goal for you then becomes aligning roles to skills more closely.
Think about this when designing a job ad. Consider the role in detail and the skills and competencies that will make a candidate successful in the position. These should stand out.
2. Re-Think Your Onboarding Processes
The statistics on onboarding are very telling. On average, new hires that are properly onboarded are 69% more likely to remain with the company for three years.
Do not confuse this with orientation.
Orientation takes a shorter period, say a week or two. On the other hand, onboarding seeks to incorporate new hires into their new roles through support, training, and continuous follow-up.
Average onboarding programs take an average of three months. An ideal onboarding should be much longer. If you cannot seem to retain employees, you might be doing your onboarding wrong.
3. Conventional Does Not Always Work
With a changing employee landscape, conventional HRM principles might not always work in your favor.
This calls for more engagement with your peers and employees in different spaces to learn what works and what doesn’t.
A great place to get invaluable insights include professional forums and job-seeking forums. Taking periodic human resources courses is also an excellent way to expand your knowledge, create new networks, and keep abreast of industry trends.
4. Think Beyond Pay Package
While many employees still consider their pay package as a key consideration before taking a job and indeed staying at one, money is not everything.
In fact, millennials would take a pay cut for a better quality of working conditions. Therefore, you must think about things such as job security, mentorship opportunities, and flexi-time. Disability insurance,(401) k, and life insurance are other perks that could help you retain employees.
5. Demonstrate Appreciation
66% of employees would quit if they felt unappreciated at work. There is indeed a lot of truth in the saying ‘people leave their bosses, not their jobs.’
Aside from being underpaid and feeling mismatched with roles, feeling unappreciated at work is also to blame for exits. Because validation and appreciation are fundamental human desires, this is understandable.
When you begin having unexplainable mass exits, this is one area to look into.
The good news is, appreciating employees does not have to cost much. Positive feedback, team lunches, handwritten thank you notes are examples of affordable ways to communicate your appreciation without denting your bottom line.
Retention is Absolutely Important
Retention ensures business continuity and hurts your company’s pockets less.
When you compute the costs of advertising a position, interviewing, hiring, training, and onboarding, they far out cost the costs of keeping your existing employees.
Successful companies look at retention proactively and institute policies to keep their employees for the long haul.
Leave A Comment