10 Ways to Prevent Your Employees From Leaving

Post A Job For Free, Promote It For A Fee

Post a Job

After going through a long recruitment process, most managers believe that their new employees will stay with them for a long time, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Employees are eager to find a job that they love and fits their needs, but they are not afraid to jump ship if a company doesn’t do that for them.

To help prevent your employees from leaving, we have put together 10 ways to help improve employee happiness as well as some common reasons employees leave their job.

Key Takeaways:

• Make sure you’re paying employees as well as you possibly can so that they don’t turn to the competition.

• Always be transparent and honest about opportunities for possible raises and promotions in the future.

• Forge strong connections with your team and invest in your employees to help them be the best they can be.

• Investing your employees professional growth and development will lead to higher retention rates because they are less likely to look for advancement elsewhere.

10 Ways To Prevent Your Employees From Leaving

1. Provide new growth opportunities. Most people want to advance in their career and have new professional growth opportunities. Having opportunities for your employees to attend classes or lectures to help them learn new things is a great way to keep them interested in the job. Ways to offer professional development opportunities include:

   • Encourage career development with a tuition reimbursement or ongoing education with flexible schedules to take classes

   • Invite them to attend industry events while counting their participation as work hours

   • Offer mentorship programs that connect new hires with more experience employees

   • Provide leadership development opportunities such as assigning new team leaders for projects

2. Provide a competitive salary and benefits. You can get away with underpaying your employees for only so long. Internally, they will be nurturing a grudge until the point when one of your competitors offers them a job. Offering more benefits such as health insurance and paid vacation is typical for most companies, so offering more will keep your employees interested. Offering flexible schedules, health and wellness programs, and paid lunches are ways to keep employees happy and satisfied.

   Researching what the typical rate for the position is with your competition is a great way to know what to have your starting rate as. Keeping your employees from looking for that compensation elsewhere will boost your retention rates. Sometimes it isn’t feasible for your organization, so you will have to rely on other employee retention to keep employees satisfied.

3. Introduce transparent communication. Without well-established, transparent communication, you will not know your people. Moreover, they will not tell you anything until the situation becomes critical and unmanageable.

   Make sure you feedback sessions regularly with your employees. The thing is that you can always prevent a valuable employee from leaving if you know beforehand what challenges they are currently facing. If you see that there is something bugging them, make the effort to find out what it is. If you are not close with the individual, you can ask someone from your team for help.

   Feedback is also a great way for your employees to voice any concerns that they have about the company. Providing a safe and comfortable place for your employees to share their thoughts and feeling will make them feel valued.

4. Set clear goals. Most people don’t really know what they want. This means that you want to talk to your subordinates and try to figure out their ambitions and plans for the future. Then, work out their role in the team together.

   Become a mentor and gradually grow professionally with your employees. Set ambitious goals for them without being afraid to delegate increasingly complex tasks. A valuable hire should trust you and feel your support.

5. Include workers. Including your employees in company decisions will help them feel as if they are apart of a team. Lack of openness stirs distrust, which harms productivity. Do not hide your vision of the company’s development and your plans for the future employee.

   Let’s say you really value your employee but that perhaps you can’t offer them a promotion or a salary raise at this point in time. In this case, you should communicate this to then as this will prevent your hires from setting false hopes and feelings of resentment.

6. Build strong connections from within. In a successful team, everyone should trust and help each other. And this is often impossible without trust, and real friendship, between peers. Your task, as a leader, is to foster your internal employee relations through team-building activities and such.

   Think about your own attitude toward your employees. Be closer to your people and find out if there are conflicts going on. Make people deliver but also to strive for establishing a positive atmosphere within the organization.

   If a person finds themselves in a comfortable environment surrounded by people they like and trust, they will work more productively and will not want to leave the team.

7. Acknowledge and reward good work. Feeling disrespected at work is one of the most common reasons people quit their jobs, second to low pay. Rewarding employees for their good work will encourage healthy competition, unite the team and demonstrate to successful employees how important they are for the company.

   Note that money is not the only incentive. If you can provide valuable hires with a couple of days off or the opportunity to attend some workshops or a conference in a different city, that would be well received.

8. Listen to employees. Do not be afraid to listen to the ideas of young employees. Instead, give them the opportunity to experiment and prove themselves. Perhaps someone from your team has repeatedly offered their solutions to solve the company’s problems but was not heard. Try to value the opinions of each employee.

   What is more, encourage the managers who pay particular attention to mentoring and working with promising hires, because they are the ones building an educational culture in your organization, which will help minimize the damage caused by leaving employees.

9. Provide flexible work arrangements. With many companies offering work-from-home options, productivity and retention rates have improved. If your company allows for a work from home option, give that to employees. Also ask your employees when they work best and give them the option to work when they can.

   Opening the office from seven a.m. to seven p.m. can give employees the option to work when works best for them. Not everyone is productive at the same times of days so allowing them to work when they are productive will increase productivity rates and improve happiness.

10. Improve work-life balance. When workers struggle with their work-life balance they are more likely to quit their job. Taking an interest in your employees personal lives and respecting that boundary can help improve their work-life balance. Having a flexible schedule also helps with the balance.

    Encouraging employees to set boundaries and take their vacation time improves their happiness. Make sure managers are also setting examples and following the same rules as employees because this will help some employees get the confidence and encouragement to focus on their work-life balance.

Common Reasons Employees Leave

• Not having room to grow. One of the biggest reasons employees leave is not having growth opportunities. When someone feels as if their career advancement isn’t going as planned, they will want to find some place that has that opportunity. Having opportunities for your employees to learn new skills and gain new experience is a great way for them to stay engaged and stay at the job.

• Micromanaging. Employees want to feel as if they are being managed, but they still have an opportunity to do things on their own without their boss hovering over them.

• Burnout. When employees are burnout they are more likely to quit their job to feel normal again. Managers should pay attention to their employees and check to see if they are struggling to manager their work-life balance.

• Inadequate salary. If an employee feels as if they are not being paid enough for their skill set and their experience, they are going to find someone who will pay them a fair wage. As prices are rising around the world, employee wages are staying the same, causing stress paying bills on time, so staying on top of employee wages will help keep employees around.

• Rigid workplace policies. If there are strict workplace rules and policies, your employees might end up being unhappy and quitting.

• No regular check-ins. Not checking in with employees regularly can result in missing the signs of an unhappy employee. With regular check-ins and feedback, managers are able to meet their employees needs and creating a positive work environment.

Benefits of Employee Retention

Employee retention is how well companies can keep their employees. Often times companies that have a low turnover rates use employee retention strategies to help encourage employees to stay with the company longer. Here are some benefits of having a high employee retention rate:

• Decreased hiring cost. Going through the recruitment process can be expensive for the company. Hiring recruiters, the onboarding process and sign-on bonuses can be costing companies more money than they can afford. When employees stay with the company longer, the need for hiring decreases and limits these costs.

• Fewer employment gaps. When you have a full staff, employees are less likely to be overworked and become burnt-out.

• Better brand reputation. When employees are happy and stay with the company longer, it can reflect positively on the company and how they operate. This can help boost the brands reputation creating more business and more people wanting to work for you.

• Higher productivity rates. When employees are happy and have a positive work-life balance, they are more productive. This helps boost the companies revenue and profits.

Author

Taylor Berman

Taylor is a freelance writer from Pennsylvania. Taylor got into writing because she enjoys writing articles that help people and loves creating stories that inspire. She earned a bachelor's degree in journalism and public relations with an interest in communications media from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.