High employee turnover is a critical problem for companies worldwide. The challenge for today\’s organizations is keeping up with global trends towards happy, healthy workers in an inclusive work environment that encourages employee wellbeing both in the workplace and in their work-life balance.

Reasons Behind High Turnover

At its very core, high employee turnover is the result of unhappy employees. While some turnover is the result of employees changes in a situation such as relocation, other reasons for high employee turnover may include:

• Inadequate benefits/pay
• Lack of advancement opportunities
• Workplace conflict
• Lack of communication
• Company culture
• Lack of work-life balance
• Poor leadership
• Inflexibility

Today\’s employees need more than just adequate pay and advancement opportunities. More and more, organizations are embracing the concept of employee wellbeing and implementing programs, strategies, and automation that enhances employee experience and increases employee retention.

One study done by the Boston College Center for Work & Family shows that job satisfaction actually ranked higher than compensation among millennial employees and most employees are not willing to sacrifice their happiness outside of work for the sake of their jobs. Instead, employees will leave a position where they are unhappy in favor of a job with a company that might pay less but provides them with more in terms of recognition, rewards, inclusion, and purpose.

Steps for Driving Retention

Deloitte\’s Human Capital Trends report suggests there are many ways companies can work towards retaining top talent and cut down on employee turnover.

Vigilant Recruitment

Retention starts with hiring the right people to start with. HR professionals have hiring practices and procedures that will evaluate potential employees\’ skills and talents but there\’s more to a great employee than just these things.

A study conducted by Universum found that 58 percent of leading employers value experience of graduates over grades and \”soft skills\” are increasingly important in a time of technology and automation.

Rewards Systems

According to their research, Deloitte says workers are often unsatisfied with rewards systems. Specifically, today\’s workers want to receive more personalized rewards and recognition for jobs well done and they want it more often. Recognizing employees for positive job performance is something Deloitte says should happen more than once per year, however, while \”20 percent of companies surveyed give workers performance ratings more than once per year but only nine percent adjust salary at that pace.\”

A study conducted by Globoforce reported that employees receiving regular small rewards such as money, points, or verbal acknowledgments are eight times more engaged than those who receive annual bonuses or pay increases. Additionally, promoting a workplace that celebrates life milestones such as marriages, childbirths, or new homes is another way companies are \”humanizing\” their company environment.

Learning and Development

Since 2009, the global L&D market has consistently grown and companies are estimated to have spent 362.2 billion U.S. dollars on different learning methods. Interestingly, face-to-face learning was the preferred method for most employees but companies implement varied forms of education and training including:

• Online training
• Mobile training
• Face-to-Face learning
• Group learning
• Mentoring

Encouraging employees to continue to develop their skills, talents, and careers is a powerful way to drive retention and help employees feel valued.

Offer Flexible Work Environments

Today, telecommuting and remote work are becoming increasingly popular and organizations are able to hire talent from anywhere in the world. If your company has not yet embraced flexible schedules, consider that remote workers are reported to be \”more engaged than in-office workers\” and \”often are more productive.\”

The majority of U.S. workers prefer flexible schedules that allow them to work differently than the old 9-5 grind and companies actually save money on real estate costs and overhead by utilizing flexible work schedules.

A flexible work schedule could include remote work, flexible hours, compressed work weeks, or flextime and is a valuable way to accommodate employees and create a comfortable working environment.

Encourage Socialization

Today\’s workers want to be connected – not just to others, but to their company\’s mission, their colleagues, and their leaders – but experts say many new hires will leave within the first 60 days if they don\’t feel a sense of connection.

To help new hires, as well as established employees, feel connected, they suggest \”the four C\’s\”:

• Compliance—teaching basic policies and procedures.
• Clarification—ensuring that new hires understand their job and related expectations.
• Culture—imparting a sense of formal and informal organizational norms.
• Connection—helping new hires establish relationships and networks.

Promoting these things will help employees feel connected and appreciated among their peers as well as their employer.

Listen to Employee Feedback

Your employees and managers are the best sources of information about what is and are not working within the whole and experts suggest that getting employee feedback will help you strengthen your organization and improve productivity and overall morale. Being willing to hear the good and bad, and being open to opportunities for change are important ways employee feedback can help you make necessary changes to improve workplace culture.

Implement Technology that Works

More and more, companies are digitizing and automating their processes and modern business solutions include apps and platforms that encourage collaboration, communication, and learning in a way that is streamlined, portable, and simple to use.

Using a solution such as HeyBuddy will encourage employee communication and results in a 100 percent increase in employee engagement which is a fundamental driver of employee retention.

Having a communications platform also helps in today\’s increasingly multi-cultural, multi-generational, diverse workforces because it allows employees to communicate and collaborate openly wherever they are. Essentially, HeyBuddy helps keep every person and department connected in a reliable, powerful way.

In addition, analytics allows managers and leaders to evaluate what is working and what isn\’t for employees which can help establish necessary changes to increase productivity and improve the employee experience.

If you are interested in implementing a powerful tool to connect your teams across the globe or even in the same city, we invite you to request a demo to see how the HeyBuddy system can help you retain your valuable employees.