Imagine working in an environment where people are truly excited to come to work each day; to a setting that supports their development, acknowledges their efforts, and gives them a voice. Retaining top talent requires an environment like this, which is what businesses are aiming to establish.
One of the most important components of any staff retention strategy is employee engagement. Workers that are engaged take pride in and derive meaning from their work. They get along with their coworkers and like their job.
We’ll examine how employee engagement and retention are related, and we’ll offer doable strategies for raising and assessing employee engagement in your business.
What Is Employee Engagement and Retention?
Employee engagement gauges how well your staff members relate to one another and to your company. Both their work and the success of their colleagues are important to them.
The ability to have a reduced turnover rate, that is, fewer people departing for other opportunities—is known as employee retention. This lessens the need to replace departing personnel with fresh hires.
Staff engagement has a significant effect on staff retention. In addition to strengthening the corporate culture, engaged employees are more likely to stay with your organisation.
Workers frequently quit because they don’t feel connected to their roles or their coworkers. It might be challenging for new hires to get involved in their work if they feel excluded from significant corporate events due to a weak company culture.
Why is it crucial to retain employees?
Retaining personnel provides many advantages for both your firm and your employees, in addition to helping to create a strong corporate culture.
Save time and money: Having a high personnel turnover rate necessitates a continuous investment in finding replacements for departing staff. Continuous onboarding and offboarding of employees is less necessary when employee retention is higher.
Keep seasoned workers: When fewer workers depart, more workers acquire experience. Experienced staff members are useful in training new hires and can make greater contributions to your company.
Stronger working relationships: Longer collaborations give employees the opportunity to develop strong working relationships with one another. Positive business cultures and better levels of employee engagement are exhibited by workers who are invested in each other’s success.
Better experience for new recruits: If those around them are constantly leaving for different positions, it may be hard for new hires to get used to their new role. When you see other employees staying with your company, it shows new hires that there are prospects for growth.
A great indicator of how well employees perform at your company and whether you need to offer extra perks or incentives to boost engagement is employee retention.
Try any of the following tactics to increase employee engagement and retention instead of waiting for retention to decline before taking action. For suggestions for your company, you can also look at well-established models of employee engagement.
Reasons for resignations among workers
Developing successful retention strategies requires an understanding of the reasons behind employee departures. You can identify and resolve the root causes of employee departure by conducting in-depth exit interviews. Employees may leave for common reasons like better income or career progress, but there are other important reasons as well, such:
Harassment and misconduct: 30% of workers who witnessed workplace harassment and misconduct quit their jobs, and 57% of workers stated that misconduct or harassment had a role in their choice to quit.
Toxic workplace: When managers’ or coworkers’ actions are inconsistent with the company’s principles, it can lead to a hostile workplace that alienates people. Stress, discontent, and a lack of faith in management can result from toxic workplaces, which eventually drives workers to look for healthier work settings elsewhere.
Mishandled or unresolved workplace issues: Employee discontent and turnover can result from mishandling employee concerns or from letting inappropriate behaviour continue unchecked. After experiencing harassment and misconduct, only 22% of workers would suggest their company as an employer. When problems are not reported, this percentage falls to 12%, and when issues are reported but not looked into, it falls to 7%. However, the recommendation percentage rose to 56% once staff concerns were brought to light, looked into, and fixed. Referrals from employees are highly associated with job satisfaction and reduced turnover, underscoring the significance of successfully resolving workplace issues.
The following are other common causes of employee resignation:
Lack of career development: When employees aren’t given the chance to grow and improve, they may leave for greater possibilities elsewhere, which raises turnover rates. Without defined career tracks, employees are more inclined to leave the company because they want to feel like they have a future there.
Poor management: Since people frequently quit managers rather than firms, poor leadership and management techniques are a prominent cause of employee turnover. Employees may seek out superior leadership elsewhere if managers don’t offer them encouragement, acknowledgement, and clear guidance.
Insufficient work-life balance: This can result in burnout and encourage workers to seek positions that provide greater flexibility and better integration of work and personal life. Workers must believe they have the time and energy to pursue their interests outside of work and that their personal lives are valued.
Increasing workload: When team members leave frequently, turnover frequently causes the remaining staff to take on more work, which, if not handled well, can result in even more turnover. Employees who are overworked are more prone to suffer from stress and burnout, which makes them look for positions with less workloads.
Pay and benefits: Offering competitive pay and extensive benefits is essential to keeping staff on board. Employees are more inclined to look for job elsewhere where they believe their efforts are better rewarded if they believe they are not receiving fair compensation for their labour or if the benefits package does not satisfy their needs.
Company performance: Employee retention can be strongly impacted by a company’s overall stability and performance. Employees may feel uncomfortable about their work prospects and choose to leave for more solid possibilities if a company is having financial difficulties or is not meeting its objectives. Workers like to work for prosperous businesses where they can envision a bright future for the company and themselves.
How to Increase Employee Engagement to Increase Retention
Let’s move on to what you can do to improve employee engagement now that you understand how it affects retention.
What makes employee involvement crucial? The advantages of employee involvement are numerous. It affects many facets of your company, and we’ll examine particular strategies to boost engagement for the sake of staff retention.
1. Good onboarding
Provide a thorough onboarding program to help new hires get off to a good start. Making sure your new hires feel at ease in their position and with their colleagues will enable them to begin fostering engagement right away.
To herald the arrival of new hires, try sending out a new employee email. This lets current staff members know when someone is new and can get them ready to help them learn if necessary. Additionally, you can offer handbooks that staff members might consult during their job. For helpful examples, see our entertaining employee handbook ideas.
By properly introducing your employees to their coworkers and their responsibilities, you may set them up for success right away.
2. A positive corporate culture
A strong onboarding procedure and a positive corporate culture go hand in hand. Your new hires should ideally possess:
understanding the organisation of your business so that you know where to direct enquiries
confidence in the culture of your company so that employees feel free to ask questions if they have any.
A welcoming and open work environment can help guarantee that new hires get the information they require. Since new hires will know exactly who to ask questions of in order to prevent needless distractions, it can also help senior staff be more productive.
A quick and simple method of gathering input on a wide range of subjects is through employee surveys. Ask questions about the business culture and learn about the expectations of your new workers by conducting surveys throughout the onboarding process. Then, compare the results with those of your current staff to identify any gaps in your employee engagement strategy.
Read also: All You Need To Know About Company Culture
3. Pay attention to your staff
How can you be certain that your workers are enjoying what they are doing? Ask them!
You and your staff can both gain from gathering employee input, which is a potent tool for discovering fresh concepts for employee engagement.
Employees are given the opportunity to voice their opinions on matters that are important to them, and you gain insightful knowledge about their experiences.
Anonymous employee feedback enables your staff to provide feedback more candidly and with greater confidence.
With simply an email, you may now learn a great deal about what your employees care about. That’s how easy it is.
4. Give your staff members a sense of worth
Workers frequently point to a lack of acknowledgement as the main cause of their disengagement. Make sure you value your employees’ success, support them in their endeavours, and acknowledge their accomplishments with creative ideas for employee appreciation.
The success of your staff benefits more than simply management. Encourage staff members to acknowledge one another when they surpass expectations. Especially in the final month of the quarter, a “shout outs” section is a perfect method to let your employees share whose work helped them.
5. Provide possibilities for workers
Your staff wants to believe that they have opportunities to advance within your organisation. By placing a high priority on your employees’ professional growth, you can make sure they understand how important their success is to the entire company.
To determine which of your employees are interested in acquiring new job skills, gather employee feedback. Talk to them, create a plan for achieving their objectives, and outline their future duties in the event that they advance in the company.
6. Events held by the company
Relationships among employees and employee engagement are closely related. Your corporate culture will be stronger if your staff get along well with one another.
Organise monthly, quarterly, or annual corporate activities to foster a sense of solidarity among your staff members. You can try a variety of workplace events:
- – holiday parties and end-of-quarter festivities
- – lunch and learns
- – pets are welcome at work
- – trivia nights
- – sporting events, and workplace teams.
You can increase staff engagement and retention with a plethora of business event ideas. Workers who are friends with their coworkers are more likely to stick with their jobs and find more satisfaction in the success of your company. You can keep track of company events on Google Calendar.
7. Avoid overburdening your staff
Not all employee engagement tactics involve giving your staff more tasks to complete. Avoiding work overload requires an understanding of how your employees relate to their work.
Show your staff that you and your company care about their well-being if they are having personal or professional difficulties. Whether it’s job-related counselling or simply a few days off to give them a mental break, give them what they need to get back on track.
Make sure your employee engagement and retention strategy takes their well-being seriously because it’s critical for your staff to feel supported by your company.
8. Develop a plan for employee engagement
A large portion of what we have discussed thus far may be organised and carried out as a component of a strategy for employee engagement. Your engagement objectives, participants, and measurement techniques are described in an employee engagement strategy.
There are many benefits to organising your staff engagement activities in advance. Give your staff advance notice of your forthcoming events to help them understand their significance. By gathering employee input, utilising employee engagement software, and making adjustments in response to their recommendations, you may determine which events your staff members prefer.
How can you tell if increasing employee engagement is truly having the desired effect? You can get measurable information to work with by looking at internal email stats. To demonstrate whether your engagement activities have been successful, you can simply monitor your internal communications data.
9. Use internal communications to monitor engagement
If, following your efforts, your company’s staff resignation is lower than usual, you’ll know that your employee retention efforts are effective. However, a decrease in departure does not always indicate a rise in employee engagement.
To see your engagement image in detail, see your internal communications. To determine the most effective times to send employee newsletters and optimise email engagement, track email metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, read time, and more. You can use this data to determine where you should concentrate your efforts and whether any particular employees are leaving your company.
10. Communicate corporate news to staff
Anxiety is bred by uncertainty. One quick and simple method to improve employee retention is to keep your staff informed about company issues that impact them.
A great method to give your staff a single, reliable source of corporate information is through an internal newsletter. Email newsletter engagement may be measured to gauge overall engagement, and there is a wealth of material available to help you come up with new ideas for employee newsletters.
As you try to tackle employee retention, the above-mentioned strategies for engagement would ensure you achieve the former if implemented appropriately.
