7 Ideas To Boost Employee Retention
7 Ideas To Boost Employee Retention
The well-being of our team members should always be our bottom line. Unfortunately, too many good employees quit due to job satisfaction issues that could easily be resolved through simple adjustments.
It’s time to elevate the mood of your work environment, provide meaningful incentives to drive employee engagement, and see your company’s culture thrive with happy, driven employees.
At the same time, you can foster meaningful business relationships, letting productivity rise with consistent teamwork and encouraging employee recognition.
By implementing some of these employee retention strategies, you empower your top talent, inspire your new hires, and prevent employee turnover. Luckily, Prezzee’s got you covered. This is our guide on seven ideas to boost employee retention.
1. Support the Mental Wellness of Employees
Many companies have seen departing employees over the past few years, citing mental health issues that healthcare initiatives could have helped mitigate. Some businesses have lost top performers from burnout, who could have prospered if leaders actively prevented burnout.
This is why it’s essential to prioritize your team members' wellness, especially for mental health. Mental health is one of the top contributors to high turnover, and it’s only gotten worse in recent years. Part of supporting the mental wellness of your employees involves minimizing the potential for your workplace to cause burnout or emotional exhaustion. For instance, simple improvements can go a long way, like more sunlight, introducing more plant life into the office, or creating a comfortable common space for employees to take breaks.
Here are some healthcare initiatives you can take within your workspace to improve support for employees:
Allow for Flexible Schedules
Implement more flexible schedules, especially for remote employees who have to juggle home life with work. People are productive at all different points of the day. With a less strict routine at work, building healthier habits at home is easier.
When your team members can start a tad later or take a longer lunch break to go for a walk or accomplish a few chores, they can enjoy their off-time more. This works easier for remote teams, but in-person or hybrid offices can also follow suit when appropriate.
In terms of flexibility, consider allowing employees to choose when they want their camera on during calls. Maybe they could take calls while on a walk if the computer isn’t needed.
Utilize Human Resources
Encourage and provide in-person counseling with your human resources department. Help employees by giving them a space to ask questions, voice concerns, and receive guidance. Together with human resources, they can find new solutions to reduce stress in the workspace, boost productivity, and find healthcare support outside of work.
Engagement surveys help leaders gauge when and how employees are the most productive. Beyond that, these surveys reveal ways to improve your work environment to reduce stress and boost mood and concentration.
Burnout During the Pandemic
With the isolation, increased anxiety, and disorganized workspaces resulting from the pandemic, mental wellness has been a new and persistent battle for many employees. The combined stresses of adjusting to lockdown and remote work created a wave that eroded mental health.
Burnout, fatigue, and emotional exhaustion were all seen to take a huge uptick during the past two years, according to studies that analyzed the stress levels of American workers over the pandemic. Employee turnover rates rose alongside this increase in fatigue.
Interestingly, a lot of this burnout and fatigue resulted from an imbalanced work-life, with work and home starting to blend uncomfortably under the new requirements of remote work.
The pandemic has taught us that we need clear separation and a steady balance between our home lives and careers.
2. Promote a Healthy Work-Life Balance
A healthy work-life balance is an essential factor in employee retention. Employees should feel that the stability of their home lives is supported — and encouraged — by their coworkers.
Without a healthy work-life balance, employees will feel like they don’t have a mutually beneficial relationship with your team, and as a result, employee retention could suffer. Our employees work hard to boost our bottom line. In return, we also have to work hard to create a strong network of support that reaches beyond the workday.
Cultivate Achievement With Careful Support
Many employees have the potential to become top performers if they’re just given the right support to get there. That support is built on a healthy work-life balance.
Employees shouldn’t feel they need to sacrifice more energy than they have to progress upward. Instead, support employees in having healthy, fulfilling home lives and, in that precise way, motivate them to bring their best selves to work. Encourage them to take time off for important events like weddings, funerals, and birthdays. Along that note, providing unlimited PTO can really help with this.
The fact is that people will want to be top performers for a company that demonstrates compassionate support for their real lives outside of work. Employees gain job satisfaction by knowing that they are supported and needed.
Calling Your Employees In
If someone falls behind on work, invite them into a conversation, offering them the support they need to get back on their feet. When we call our employees in and work hard to understand what they’re going through, we demonstrate our support for their life outside of work.
By giving time off to employees dealing with fatigue or burnout, you encourage a healthy work-life balance and boost your team's productivity. Employees do not overwork themselves or worry about seeming like a burden to their team when mental health breaks are encouraged with compassion. We feel energized and interested when our mood is in check.
Emphasize to team members that their wellness at home is essential to the soundness of the workplace and team. Talk with them about ways you can help make that happen.
3. Express Employee Appreciation
This is such a simple point, but it often gets overlooked in the hustle of the work week. Employees feel more fulfilled working for a company where they are explicitly appreciated.
Employee retention often sinks in businesses where hard work is expected rather than rewarded. There is no satisfaction in completing a task when employees feel invisible, despite the time and energy they sacrifice.
Ways To Show Employee Appreciation
When an employee performs well and does hard work, taking on more than usual, it’s important to recognize that.
Here are some ways we can show employee appreciation:
- Try rewarding employees for their hard work with a thoughtful digital gift card for a brand they love. By expressing your gratitude and acknowledging their hard work, you show appreciation and recognize the extra effort they put forth. At the same time, encourage them to enjoy themselves outside of work.
- Try to thank your employees personally and on behalf of the whole workplace. Emphasize that the work they do also helps to support their team members. Start recognition programs where employees can be celebrated and rewarded for outstanding performance by the whole team.
- Celebrating birthdays is a fun way to show appreciation. Remind your employees that they are valuable when they are making great strides and when they are just doing their normal roles.
- Monthly acknowledgments are a fun way to express employee appreciation. But rather than doing an employee-of-the-month contest, find a less competitive, more inclusive way to say thank you. Try having fun with superlatives, emphasizing each team member for the particular strengths they contribute to the team.
Employees stay in jobs where they have stability and support. By encouraging team members to work communally rather than competitively, you create a workplace culture that emphasizes and rewards strong team-building.
Employees feel appreciated in jobs where they can find a tangible support network not just through human resources but with their fellow team members as well.
4. Provide Paths for Career Advancement
While employees certainly appreciate stable, reliable jobs, stagnancy can lead many people to look for better opportunities elsewhere.
Offer your employees a position plus a career path that can help them grow. There are several engaging ways to promote career development.
Employees feel loyal to those companies that cultivate their career growth. At the end of the day, you boost productivity, and your employee retention rate soars because your team is motivated by tangible ways to cultivate professional development.
Development Opportunities That Motivate Employees
You can offer your employees many development opportunities to motivate them to progress down their career paths and take on more responsibilities in the workplace.
Here are a few suggestions we’ve come up with:
- Offer seminars and Q&As from long-standing professionals in your chosen field. These group activities encourage creative thinking and new workplace friendships, all while providing employees with the information they need to plan their professional development.
- Incentivize team members to take on new responsibilities and learn new skills by rewarding them with incentive gifts that show your appreciation for their professional development. Instead of treating their career development as its own reward, you can thank your employees for learning more useful skills to contribute to the team.
- A mentorship program gradually guides employees down their desired career path. It can also make for a much smoother onboarding process. Employees can shadow a more experienced team member or take on a kind of apprenticeship role under them, learning little by little how to take on larger responsibilities and more active roles within the company.
- Introduce your team members to online courses and other classes they can take in person to learn new skills or perform a new job within your team. In some cases, you can even offer team members compensation (like a luxury eGift card) for these classes, emphasizing the importance of these skills to your company.
No matter how you structure the company's career development, providing them with a way to progress serves to boost motivation and sharpen interest. Final takeaway: Effective employee retention strategies must always include opportunities for upward mobility, not merely something shiny to add to their LinkedIn.
5. Foster a Community Around Your Workplace
Most employee retention strategies focus on the professional lives of team members, but they miss out on the human aspect of the workplace.
Categories like professional development and support can boost employee satisfaction, making it more lucrative to stay with a particular company. But sometimes, people get burned out or emotionally exhausted from jobs simply because they haven’t made many personal connections or friendships with their team members.
This can make a workspace seem cold or uninviting. It’s hard to continue working and contributing to a team you haven’t personally connected with. Without a sense of community, teamwork can feel obligatory and unfulfilling.
Humanizing Employee Experience with Community
Sometimes, it’s not the job we’re doing that fulfills us but the people that we’re working with. Through our team members, we see our real impact on others by working with them and supporting them.
In many ways, our neighbors at work are our first network of support, but team-building is impossible when that feeling of support is not there. Bring real soul into your workplace by encouraging your employees to get to know each other. Come up with fun activities to celebrate achievements or milestones. These milestones can be as little as finishing the week.
Activities that Foster Community
Encouraging community is easier when we create a social atmosphere where employees feel comfortable breaking the ice. Here are some top-notch community activities to incorporate into the workplace:
- Offer employees a free breakfast or lunch in your breakroom or common space. This event can come at the end of the work week, giving employees something to look forward to and a way to mark another week accomplished. Let this free food come with a longer break where employees can mingle as they chow down. For remote teams, a digital gift card to top dining locales can make an equally fantastic impact.
- Turn a monthly earnings report or performance report into a more engaging, collaborative event. Encourage employees to speak up, ask questions, and discuss possibilities with the rest of the team. After the report, celebrate with a group activity like a friendly game or a snack pot-luck, where every employee contributes desserts or cravings. This is also a great way to emphasize team building.
- Holiday parties are a fun way to let loose and show the team your wild side. Sometimes, goofing off with our coworkers and taking ourselves a little less seriously can really reduce the pressure of the career grind. At the same time, we let our team members in, breaking the ice and helping them feel more comfortable being themselves.
- Create an awards ceremony where employees vote for certain superlatives. After the voting, you can all have a laugh as a community when the winners are revealed. You can even go the extra mile by taking pictures or creating a parody yearbook to commemorate the year. Keep it HR-approved and workplace appropriate.
Any of these activities and more can break up the tedium of the workweek, allowing us to be a little more informal or a tad less strictly professional. While some ideas may seem corny at first, they help us take ourselves a little less seriously, ultimately making it easier and less awkward to make real connections.
6. Use Perks To Incentivize Retention
Many of us are already familiar with annual raises as a means to incentivize employee retention. This practice is fairly customary. However, there are plenty of other perks you can introduce for those who’ve been on your team for a long time.
People feel that they are making an investment in their career path when they can earn tangible benefits for staying with a particular company. These benefits may just boil down to simple ways of making home-life or work-life more enjoyable.
Some companies offer extra days off, increased flexibility, or work-from-home benefits (including eGift cards to furnish that home office). Either way, these perks can motivate employees to build a career within your company.
Perks That Build Loyalty
Looking for perks to say thank you to your coworkers? Consider these:
- Extra vacation time during the year to repay employees for the time and energy they’ve given to the company.
- An online course voucher, or similar type of educational scholarship, can support the professional development of your celebrated team members while motivating them to learn new skills.
- A virtual gift card for a fun vacation, experience, or other activity that lets your employees know that they deserve some rest and recreation after the work they’ve put in.
- Granting employees work-from-home privileges means allowing them to skip the office on certain days, completing their work from home. While remote work may seem less desirable nowadays than it used to, many people still prefer it. Plus, being given a choice to come into the office or not can be quite the privilege, showing that the company trusts you to work without management.
With perks like these, employees feel inspired to continue their progress within the company.
Celebrate Work Anniversaries
It can be a rewarding experience for the entire company to celebrate a team member on the anniversary of their employment. Together, mark the progress and growth the person of honor has made within the company.
Make a special occasion out of a long-term work anniversary. For those employees who have been with your company for a particularly long time, perhaps plan a workplace party with food, cake, and other fan-favorite goodies.
At the same time, you get to promote the perks of long-term company engagement. Your employees get a taste of the benefits that lay ahead. Plus, they’re motivated by the appreciation they see expressed to a long-standing member of the corporate community.
7. Communicate Expectations Clearly
Plenty of employees leave jobs simply because they were given a different impression of the company while interviewing compared to what they discovered once they were hired.
It’s essential to clearly communicate the expectations during the recruitment process. Many people looking for work are filling out tons of applications every day, so realistically, they might not be reading every detail of your job posting.
After you’ve found a potential new hire, review the responsibilities and qualifications with them during the interview process. If you can, introduce them to your team, or give them a tour of your workplace, to help them get a sense of what to expect.
Mentorships Help Ease Employees In
Mentorships can make training more productive and personally rewarding. New hires get to introduce themselves to others while getting a taste of what working with your team might feel like.
At the same time, they take on responsibilities as they go, shadowing their mentor at a healthy pace, not prohibited by strict training regimes. The mentor can explain things in real-time, answering questions and providing useful tips to deal with specific problems.
Mentorships create a sense of community and work as proficient team-building exercises. Now, your new hire has someone familiar they can trust within your community to introduce them to the rest of the team and show them the social ropes.
Mentoring doesn’t need to be exclusively IRL. Remote companies can use Slack messages, regularly scheduled Zoom calls, or work collaboratively over a shared Google doc.
Build Work-Load Gradually
While you may have high expectations for your employees, it never bodes well to dump them down all at once. While some companies may have a hit-the-ground-running philosophy, these techniques rarely benefit employee health or workplace productivity.
Adapting quickly might be a useful skill, but ask yourself if it’s as useful now to your new hires as the skills they’re supposed to be learning on the job. Avoidable mistakes caused by overworked new hires can put a wrench in workplace productivity and create unnecessary tension, resentment, and other negative feelings. So please, introduce your new employee to their responsibilities gradually, letting them master each at a healthy pace without hurting the workflow of others.
Use Exit Interviews to Survey Employee Satisfaction
Finally, you can learn a lot from an exit interview conducted with an employee moving on from the company. This is a unique opportunity to find out what a particular employee expected from their career versus what they feel like they actually got.
These are sometimes rare insights to gain. Exit interviews can provide valuable, candid impressions of your business from an outside perspective or a disinterested party.
Prepare yourself to face criticism with an eye for innovation. Even if you encounter some bitter complaints, they will only give you a richer sense of the professional, social, and emotional impact your workplace culture has made and can make.
Be an Open-Book. Appreciate Your Staff.
It’s become quite hard in today’s world to be a closed-book as a company.
The internet has created many forums, like Glassdoor, where employees and ex-employees can review their workplaces, rate the management, and discuss the pros and cons. The people of today are much more informed about what other companies are offering and what other people are saying about your company.
So do your best to be an open book. Talk candidly with your new hires about things that you’re working on improving within the company.
Show Appreciation for Your Team With Prezzee
We hope you’ve enjoyed our ultimate guide to employee retention! At Prezzee, we’re passionate about helping you foster a community with your team to build a thriving, vibrant work culture.
Whether you're looking for incentives to boost workplace performance, rewards to strengthen loyalty, or gifts to show employee appreciation on holidays, Prezzee has you covered with a huge catalog of digital gift cards. Our eGift cards make great corporate gifts for any occasion, with hundreds of activities, stores, brands, or interests to filter your search.
Treat your valued employees with gift cards for food and wine, health and beauty products, vacations, and other engaging activities. Customize your gift with a unique message (text or a video) and your company logo.
Sources:
Burnout And Stress Are Everywhere | American Psychological Association
The Scientific Link That Drives Employee Engagement and Productivity | Joe Robinson
The Company Christmas Party And Employee Happiness | Scientific Reports
The Five Secrets Of The Best Mentoring Programs | Forbes
Five Strategies For Improving Work-Life Balance | Forbes