Turnover is a hard truth of business. Some employees will quit no matter what you do. Unfortunately, many businesses lose good employees that might have stayed. So what can you do to keep the turnover rate down at your business? Here are five tips that will get you started in the right direction.
1. Hire Right
It’s hard to focus on anything but skills when you’re shorthanded and need bodies, but you should make the effort. There is no question that skills matter. Something that matters as much is culture fit. Hire someone who can’t mesh with the culture at your business and you’ll be stuck in another hiring process before you know it.
Takeaway: A bad culture fit will prove incredibly disruptive to your business. Take the time to hire for culture fit.
2. Hire Versatile Employees
Versatile employees make for excellent employees. You can move them around your business until you find the exact right position for them. While that process goes on, you ease the burden on your existing staff.
3. Simplify Processes
Want angry, disgruntled employees? Force them to perform redundant or unnecessarily byzantine processes. For example, no employee should need to enter a customer’s contact information more than once. If they do, it means your system isn’t propagating that information to all the places it needs to go.
Takeaway: Review your processes periodically to ensure they’re as simple as possible.
4. Offer Recognition
Employees crave recognition from their superiors. They crave it so much, in fact, that providing it on a regular basis makes employees more productive, loyal, and satisfied. It’s not grand gestures either. Employees just want a sincere acknowledgment of their contributions. You can even take it up a notch and create a peer-to-peer acknowledgment program that lets employees recognize each other.
5. Boost Engagement through Training
It’s the rare employee who knowingly wants to do a bad job. Underperformance often traces back to insufficient training. Periodically poll employees about what kind of training they believe they need to do their jobs better. Once you have that information in hand, act on it to the best of your ability. You can take this another step by offering career advancement training that allows people to promote to leadership positions in the organization.
Takeaway: People who get the training they require will feel more engaged and empowered by their employers. This often creates a more loyal group of employees.
Turnover is unavoidable, but you can often take steps that will dramatically slow the exodus of good employees. Offer regular recognition for work done well. Offer training opportunities. Hire candidates with good culture fit and versatility. Simplify processes so employees don’t have to repeat the same work over and over. It’ll go a long way toward keeping employees happy and at your business.
Facing a sudden bout of turnover in your business? Let Timpl help you find those employees with the right skills and culture fit for your business.
