3 Ways to Retain Staff

The business world has undergone dramatic changes over the last two decades. With more people changing roles and moving to different businesses, one of the most strategic advantages any business can have is great staff retention.

It has become critical to the strategic and long term vision for businesses to keep their staff, ensuring customer satisfaction, increased sales, satisfied, happy coworkers, and effective succession planning.

However, if you don’t keep your staff, your business will have short term and long term consequences. From extra money being pumped in to find new recruits, to giving the new starter at least 6 months to get to grips with the technology and processes in order to make this a successful business venture.

So what are the best ways to keep hold of the staff that you have on your books? Here are some top tips for better staff retention.

Set out the goals and objectives from the beginning 

This is about management and culture combined. If your staff doesn’t know what the goals or the objectives are of the business moving forward, how will they ever feel fulfilled and, how will they ever accomplish what the business needs to do?

Create the communication structure from the beginning and set out what you need your employee to accomplish. Make it so that they understand the role and responsibilities from the beginning; it creates trust and objectives that every one can aim for.

Tools, Time, Train 

If you give the team member the right tools, you are halfway there. Things like HR Systems, time management software and the necessary programs to do the role are essential. The second element to all of this is time. You need to give staff time to adapt and learn the role. There are plenty of soft skills that you have which take time to learn as well as learning the fundamentals of the job as well.

Finally, training. In Gallup polls and staff exit surveys one of the time honoured grievances that always pops up is training. Lack of to be precise. People need to feel that they are learning and getting new skills, no job is ever the same for years on end. You need staff who are motivated to turn up and challenge the status quo in the business.

Open communication 

Whether this is senior management and even company president’s or it is the cleaner who needs to have a chat with the people that matter the most, what needs to be done is to create an environment of open communication.

We all like to be heard and we all like to voice our opinions; but when the company environment doesn’t allow it to happen, it can create issues moving forwards. In exit interviews, it is often referenced that staff feel unheard and even treated poorly by senior management when it comes to simple acknowledgement let alone someone being brave to stand up for what they think the business could be doing better.