High employee turnover is costly and often the result of a poor recruitment process and poorly designed or non-existent induction programme. This often leads to employees leaving companies sooner rather than later. The net result is expensive and disruptive but can be avoided.
Aside from paying the market rate, or above the market rate, and offering attractive benefits to all your staff, below are a few more actions you can take to help reduce your employee turnover.
-
Be realistic
Give a realistic job preview to prospective employees at the interview stage. Avoid overselling or minimising aspects of the role to make the job sound better or more interesting than it actually is. Give them the good the bad and the ugly. By doing this, your chosen candidate will not have any surprises once they start, and will respect you all the more for it.
-
Career development
Maximise opportunities to develop skills and take time to understand and manage people’s career expectations. In the absence of promotion, look at sideways moves that offer new and varied experience and make the work more interesting. By developing your workforce and knowledge base, you are strengthening the business.
-
Consult employees
Give employees a ‘voice’ through regular appraisals, attitude surveys and grievance systems. Without the opportunity to voice dissatisfaction or influence outcomes, employees will feel undervalued. By listening to their views and opinions, you not only make your staff feel better, but you will have better insights in to how your staff really feel about things. In the absence of this, resigning may be their only option.
-
Be flexible
Accommodate preferences on working hours and times where you can and monitor workload to ensure it is manageable within working hours. The more flexible you can be, the more your employees feel trusted and inclined to go the extra mile.
-
Be fair
A perception of unfairness, is a major cause of voluntary resignations. Be mindful of treating all employees fairly and avoid favouring some employees over others.
