8 Employee Retention Tips for Companies of All Sizes

A low employee retention rate will put a handbrake on your company’s growth.

Not only is the direct cost of replacing an outgoing employee around 20% of their salary. But the effect a conveyor belt of outgoing and incoming hires has on your businesses productivity and team morale can bump the indirect costs up real high.

Want to keep turnover low and hold on to your top performers? Here are today’s eight most effective employee retention tips – and how large and small organizations can start applying them today. 

What are the top retention tips?

Engage your employees

If your employees don’t find their work engaging, they’re not likely to stick around for very long. You’ll definitely struggle to retain your top talent if they don’t enjoy their work or feel like it puts their unique talents to good use, that’s for sure. 

In fact, over a third of disengaged employees are actively applying to new jobs compared to just 5% of engaged employees.

Businesses of all sizes need to be careful to regularly check the pulse of how their people are feeling about their work through engagement surveys and asking the right questions in one-to-ones.

Large organizations need to be particularly careful here, as their employees can easily end up feeling like cogs in a machine. The challenge for big businesses is making sure their people have plenty of agency over what they do, how they do it, and when they do it. Fail on these fronts and you’ll always struggle to reduce employee turnover. 

Start-ups are less likely to have this problem, but need to make sure they’ve got the right people in the right jobs. The fewer employees your business has, the more important it is that each of them is fully engaged and firing on all cylinders.

Book a demo of Assembly to get access to all the tools you need to boost employee engagement in one place.

Make employee wellbeing a priority

62% of workers say employee wellbeing support and benefits are a top priority when applying for or considering their next job. So, if you want to reduce employee turnover and absenteeism, you need to make your people’s wellbeing a priority. 

For businesses of all sizes, that starts with creating a company culture that leaves your teammates feeling comfortable speaking up if they’re not happy at work without having to worry about losing their job.

It’s also crucial that you make sure you’re not putting so much on your employees’ plates that they need to regularly work overtime to get it all done.

This is another area where big businesses have an advantage. They have more staff, more money to invest into bringing in support from agencies and freelancers when it's needed, and an established hiring process that allows them to quickly bring in new hires as soon as they’re needed. 

Start-ups need to be more careful when it comes to putting too much on their employees’ plates, as it’s easy to do during a hectic sprint – and start-up life can end up being one long sprint. Make sure you’re not pushing your people too hard by regularly checking in with them through pulse surveys and during one-to-ones. 

Don’t hold your people back

Fail to create room for your teammates to grow into and they’re not likely to stay your teammates for too long. In fact, 41% of workers have quit a previous job due to the lack of progression opportunities.

Mapping out a career path alongside each of your employees is a lot easier for large organizations, which have a lot more responsibility to spread out and more easily create new roles that tick all a promising employee’s boxes. 

Start-ups, on the other hand, need to make sure their teammates’ career aspirations are a regular topic during one-to-ones. Then they should try and carve out those opportunities for their top performers so they can grow with their fledgling business rather than hitting a glass ceiling and having to leave.

Try Assembly to see how easy it can make taking the pulse of how your employees feel about their career opportunities at your company.

Train your managers

82% of people have thought about quitting a job because of a bad manager.

Which means the companies that fail to give their managers the training, tools, and support they need to lead their teams effectively will always struggle to keep their turnover rates down.

Large organizations have a lot more money to invest into building the infrastructure to train great managers. That might involve external training or even setting up a whole department dedicated to training your people managers.

Small businesses, which don’t have this luxury, would be well advised to hire people with people management experience for their manager roles. And while they’re always going to have less budget to invest in their training than multinational corporations, any money they do invest in training their people manager is going to have a huge ROI.

Offer remote working

These days, if you let your people work remotely then that’s a deal breaker for a lot of them. In fact, 71% of employees open to looking for a job aren’t happy with how flexible their current organization is willing to be. 

Large organizations are often the slowest to react to the latest employee demands – especially established businesses in traditional industries. If you’re in a big business, you need to embrace telework to avoid an exodus of your top talent to start-ups (or your more forward-thinking competitors). 

Onboard your people the right way

38% of workers who quit do so in the first year – and 66% who leave in the first year do so in the first six months.

So the way you welcome new employees plays a huge part in your turnover rates. 

Despite this, 51% of employees think their onboarding experience at their current job was subpar. 

Both big and small businesses can both kick things off on the right foot with a new hire survey. This will help set your new teammates up for success – and give you a much better idea of how they work and what’s important to them.

Try Assembly to see how easy it can make creating a first-class onboarding experience for your new employees.

Give every employee a stake in your business

A strong employee share scheme can not only help your company attract top performers in the first place. It can help keep them on your payroll for years to come. In fact, 95% of businesses with a share scheme say it has actively helped to improve employee loyalty. 

While large organizations with dedicated accounting and legal teams are better placed to set up a share scheme, there are plenty of digital tools start-ups can set up and manage an employee share scheme through. And smaller companies that create one will set themselves apart from the competition and put themselves on a level playing field with big business when it comes to options.

Give your people a voice

Businesses that give their employees a voice are a 12X more likely to retain them. 

And it’s no wonder why. Empower your people with a real say in how things are done in your organization and they can have their say on your company’s direction and carve out the job they want.

The smaller your company is, the more of a say in how you do things each of your teammates will feel like they have. But start-ups need to be mindful to maintain this as they grow.

It’s a lot harder for large organizations to make sure each and every one of their employees feels like their voice is heard. The bigger your business, the more important surveys and one-to-ones become for making sure each of your people have a voice.

The final word

The employee retention challenge is something companies of all sizes need to figure out if they want to survive wherever the latest employee turnover trends throw at them. Apply these eight employee retention tips to your business and your turnover rate is sure to drop.