How Do You Improve Employee Retention?
Employee retention refers to how long employees remain at a company.
To find the employee retention rate of your organization, just divide the number of employees at the beginning of one time period by those that left during that same period.
HR departments can find more granular versions of this number by averaging these numbers over different time periods, segmenting by employee category, department, or other criteria.
Employee retention can be impacted by a wide range of factors.
Those that can be controlled include:
- Work environment, such as physical environment, culture, or schedule
- Tools and technology
- Salary and benefits
- Onboarding and training
- Ongoing professional development and opportunities for growth
Not all of these can be easily controlled. Salary, work location, and schedule, for instance, are not always able to be influenced.
Other elements, however, can be changed.
Here are a few examples of methods to improve employee retention:
- Improving employee onboarding can improve the impression an employee gets of the company, provide them with better skills, and reduce frustration
- Give employees perks that won’t impact their performance or the company, such as the option to work remotely, schedule flexibility, and recognitions or rewards
- Gain insight into retention by regularly obtaining employee feedback, using data-driven technology to find patterns in employee behavior, and developing solutions to problems you uncover
Because the causes for low retention vary from company to company, solutions must also be unique.
A careful, thorough analysis of employee retention will certainly offer up several ways to reduce that rate and improve the workplace.
