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- Strong Onboarding – Be sure to integrate a strong onboarding process into your company. Strong onboarding helps the new employee feel like they’re apart of the team.
- Make Sure Employees Feel Valued – Everyone wants to be appreciated. If that quality employee feels like they’re not being appreciated with your company, they’ll just leave and find that somewhere else.
- Challenge Your Employees – Quality employees aren’t going to stay with your company if they’re not being challenged. They want the opportunity to showcase their skills, and learn as much as they can.
In today’s workforce it seems like it’s difficult to keep quality employees. You’ll hire an all-star prospect to come join your team and before you know it they’re leaving and moving on to their next company. So what do you do? What are some strategies you can execute to retain quality employees?
Why Is It Hard to Keep Quality Employees?
Before we begin to discuss strategies for keeping quality employees, we first have to understand the issue. People in the workforce are realizing that they have the power. What do I mean? Well, the job market is doing extremely well. Unemployment is at a record low. Unemployment is at the lowest it’s been in nearly 50 years. Anyone who ever had trouble finding work is no longer having that problem.
What’s even worse for companies are people who just want to leave their current role for a job that pays more money. It’s estimated on average people who switch jobs get a 6% bump in pay. The job market is so strong that employees not only know that they’re able to switch jobs, but they can also request higher pay due to their value. The graph below, provided by Quartz, shows the annual rate of job changes by employees over the years.
Not to add insult to injury, but it’s even worse among millennials who are job hopping like crazy. To learn a few strategies for retaining millennials in the workplace, check out our recent blog here.
How Did This Happen?
There are multiple factors that contribute to the growth we’re seeing in the job market. What I’ll be focusing on are a couple that I believe make this strong job market different than years past.
I attest social media to being a factor as to why we’re seeing such movement in today’s job market. Social media gives everyone a voice, and if you’re able to get enough followers, your voice now matters. Because of that, we have now created the concept of social entrepreneurship.
Imagine this: every day you post #SOTD meaning Shirt of the Day. Everyday you’re simply just posting what shirt you’re wearing. Then your followers start to rise and you get the status of an influencer. Then you catch the attention of big clothing brands like Nike or Adidas. Now they want to pay you to wear their clothes. You’re now a social entrepreneur. What’s worse for employers is that generation Z is expected to become the most entrepreneurial generation ever. So with so many people moving to entrepreneurship, it means less people wanting to work for your company.
I also attest “gigs” as being a factor to the rise in job vacancies. You’re seeing more and more people switching over to working for Uber, Post Mates, or freelancing. There are so many non-traditional jobs that many people don’t feel the need to work for a traditional company.
How an Employee Feels At a Job
Lets take a moment to try to get into the head of an employee. Consider the following example:
Chris just accepted a position with a company. He truly enjoys it at first, but then he begins to have troubles. He starts to realize that the culture isn’t what he was hoping it would be. Chris’s boss then starts to ask him to do work that he was not expecting to have to do, but didn’t communicate with him this change. On top of all of that, Chris doesn’t feel appreciated. So after being with this company for only 6 months, he decides to leave to find another job.
So as an employer, what can you do to prevent this?
Retention Strategies You Need To Start Doing Today
There are plenty of reasons that explain why it’s hard to keep quality employees with your company. Below are a few strategies to help you solve that problem:
- Strong Onboarding – Be sure to integrate a strong onboarding process into your company. Strong onboarding helps the new employee feel like they’re apart of the team. It helps the employee build that connection with the company. If your new quality employee feels like they weren’t trained properly, or that they don’t connect with their coworkers, they’re going to leave because they don’t fully understand the position or connect with the company culture.
- Competitive Pay – Make sure you offer competitive pay for your employees. Remember that the employees have the power, so if they feel as though they’re not getting paid enough, they’ll go somewhere else.
- Make Sure Employees Feel Valued – Everyone wants to be appreciated. If that quality employee feels like they’re not being appreciated with your company, they’ll just leave and find that somewhere else.
- Strong Management – Believe it or not, but people want to be lead. They want guidance but they also want clarity. Don’t be a manager that throws out orders and just says “because I said so.” Quality employees want to know why they’re doing something because it helps them understand and grow.
- Challenge Your Employees – Quality employees aren’t going to stay with your company if they’re not being challenged. They want the opportunity to showcase their skills, and learn as much as they can.
- Strong Company Culture – Focus on developing a strong company culture for your employees. Work should be fun sometimes, and it’s more than just having a ping pong table in the break room. It’s having activities, events, and parties that promote employees getting away from their computers and having fun together. If employees enjoy coming to work, they won’t want to leave.
Implement these strategies to ensure that you can keep quality employees with your company. They will cut down on turnover, and even enhance your employee’s experience.
Closing Thoughts
We’d love to know what you think, or answer any questions you may have. Please leave a comment below to tell us your thoughts. To learn more, or if you have any questions, please email me at rsanders@validityscreening.com. For more great blogs and content please subscribe to our blogs.