As a business owner, one of the things you cannot afford to underestimate is the importance of employee satisfaction when it comes to the success of your company. Happier employees are known to perform better than their unsatisfied counterparts, which can only mean good things for your business.
Building long term relationships with your employees is important for a number of reasons. Avoiding turnover will save you money in the long run and can contribute greatly to the success of your business. Here are just a few of the reasons why a focus on employee retention is important.
Why You Should Focus on Employee Retention
Your Employees are Valuable
Imagine losing some of the top performing employees at your company. Even if you only lost one or two, this would come as a huge blow.
Not only are you left with a new position to fill, which will cost you valuable time and money–you now have to sacrifice the attention of your remaining top employees to train your new hires.
If you’re not focused on employee retention, chances are, you’re not focused on the value of your employees and the importance of meeting their needs and desires. Employee turnover is never a great thing, so don’t forget the value of the people who make your business what it is.
Inconsistency Will Cause Your Business to Suffer
Employee turnover means having new employees constantly in and out of the door. More than likely, this would make the general atmosphere of any business pretty chaotic.
Customers will notice when the names of the people they interact with are constantly changing, making things seem much less familiar. Since customers likely return to businesses they comfortable with, this constant shift won’t do much by way of establishing or maintaining brand trust and loyalty.
At the same time, it is extremely difficult to set goals and maintain any sort of business strategy or growing success when your employees are constantly changing. Management will need to focus on training new employees rather than focusing on growth strategies and ways to improve the company. On top of that, newer employees generally lack the skills that more seasoned employees have, which means your business will be functioning at lower-than-usual standards.
Turnover Costs Your Business Money
We know that training and bringing in new employees costs money, but the cost of employee turnover is much bigger than that. The Center for American Progress determines that it costs companies roughly 20% of an employee’s salary to replace just one of the team member.
This means, for each employee your company loses, the time, energy, and resources that go into replacing them could end up costing your company the equivalent of two month’s worth of salary.
If you’re replacing employees on a regular basis, you can imagine what this might do to your bottom line.
Creating consistent and worthwhile training programs is a crucial piece of employee retention. New team members need to feel confident in their abilities and have a great understanding of how they can perform well in their respective roles.
Take the time to show new hires how to be successful, and chances are, they will be.
Get to Know Your Employees
If you have a cold and distant relationship with your employees, chances, are they might not like you very much. Since employees who give their managers lower ratings are four times more likely to be interviewing at other jobs than their peers, building relationships with your people is a great way to focus on retention.
Your employees are not just cogs in a machine, carrying out jobs to keep your business running. These are individuals with unique personalities, talents, and abilities.
If you don’t take the time to get to know your employees and build relationships with them, you’re likely to lose them for a number of reasons:
First, you deny yourself the opportunity to get to know them on a personal level. Every employee is different, so this will greatly limit your abilities to coach them in a truly beneficial way. Secondly, you deny your employees the chance to get to know and trust you. This makes matters difficult because it’s much easier to take constructive criticism from someone we know and trust than from someone who instills a feeling of fear when we encounter them every few months.
Create Strong Leaders with Opportunities for Growth
As humans, we aren’t excited to perform well in areas of our life when we feel stuck. Motivation is lacking and inspiration is often a thing of the distant past when we get stuck in the same routines, day in and day out.
Offering opportunities for advancement and leadership allow your employees to feel confident in themselves, their abilities and their ideas.
Take the time to create a business structure that allows employees to learn new things and aspire toward reaching new goals and accomplishments. Allow your team members to attend leadership workshops and give them benchmarks and set goals to reach.
Offer Incentive Programs
Although some are tempted to write incentive programs off as too much work, or too big of an investment, they don’t need to be as extravagant as you may think. From offering gift cards to personal awards and acknowledgment, there are plenty of ways you can encourage your employees and make them feel appreciated for their achievements.
Travel incentive programs can be as extravagant as an all-expenses-paid resort vacation to a trip to a baseball game in the spring. Whether you choose to offer these incentives as rewards for employees for performance or simply as a treat once a year for your entire staff, the key is always to make sure your employees are able to feel how much you value them and the work they do each day.
The experts at MTI Events understand how much productive, happy employees mean to a business and we want to help you create an incentive program that your team can get excited about. Contact us today to get started.
