Why should we be looking to retain our employees?
It’s all to do with employee retention.
Employee retention is the organisational goal of keeping talented employees and reducing turnover. By fostering a positive work atmosphere to promote engagement. Showing appreciation to employees. And providing competitive pay and benefits and healthy work-life balance. Many business leaders know the importance of how to improve employee retention.
It’s what we help with at YourFLOCK.
However, many people in different industries have different views. When it comes to retaining staff. For some, a high churn rate is a feature of the sector they are in. The way things are. And something you can’t change.
For others employee turnover is an average they can benchmark and try to decrease. No matter who you are . You should know that employee retention promotes the health and success of your organisation. The time, stress, and cost of hiring and training new employees are significant. And turnover can have a negative impact on your business outcomes.
As Quantum Workplace rightly concludes:
“High employee turnover brings about multiple problems including high costs, knowledge loss, and low productivity.”
Whilst the rates for this turnover change between company to company. Governments produce statistics around the overall averages in sectors. For example, employee turnover statistics for the UK. rank publishing and events as the sectors with the highest job turnover rate. The project-based nature of work in these sectors might be causing high industry turnover rates. Employees contribute their part until the project ends. Build up their portfolio, and move on to a different project, often in a different company.
In America, the industry with the highest rate of employee turnover is accommodation and food service at 130.7% as of 2020. Other fields that had extremely high rates of staff turnover in 2020 include:
– the arts and entertainment industry with 129.3%,
– retail trade with – 69.7%,
– and construction with 69.6%.
The above stats are taken from the US. Where new research shows that 73% of workers are considering quitting their jobs next year. In the UK, similar surveys also found that three in four would look for new work in 2022.
So why is employee retention something to aim for?
This is because
“Approximately 60-70% of all turnover is voluntary.”
Which means something can be done about it. Whether that’s better onboarding. Or employee engagement surveys. Or getting more feedback from employees around their employee experience. Lots of things can be done. So team leaders and bosses of business can help reduce employee turnover. Which can cost an organisation twice the cost of hiring someone in the first place.
“Replacing employees is expensive, with costs ranging anywhere from 16% to 213% of an employees’ salary. U.S. organisations pay up to 1 trillion in turnover expenses annually.”
The fact of the matter is that losing people is a very foolish way of losing money in the business. Losing people also affects the people that stay and company morale. Whether or not they were a higher trained and talented member of the team or not. As employees are human beings, with human emotions. So other employees may decide to leave because they notice others are job hunting. Or they are talking about quitting or actually leaving.
Organisations with successful employee retention programs can lift employee morale. Enable greater connectedness and engagement. And create contagions of positive emotions in the workplace. There are many other reasons why you want to keep your employees together for longer. And not just their own happiness and productivity.
Whilst as you can see from the article. “Top 6 Factors That Drive Better Employee Retention”. There are some main themes when it comes to retaining employees.
- People and culture.
- Work acknowledgement. …
- Meaningful benefits. …
- Ongoing training. …
- Workplace environment. …
- Mission and values alignment.
Your FLOCK our team engagement platform helps with many of these…. So keeping your employees together is something which is possible. Losing employees every year isn’t inevitable. Depending on the size of your business and your teams. And how much your team leaders and managers (and bosses) understand the problem.
And use the different employee retention strategies above. And of course, use Your FLOCK. But we would say that…
