It should be no surprise to any business leader that your employees are among the most valuable influencers of your company’s success. Their insights and practical contributions keep your business functional, productive, and innovative. Making the most of your workforce requires you to encourage your employees to stick with your company in the long-term.
Some turnover is natural. It’s when turnover becomes excessive that you start to get disruptions that can prove financially and culturally costly. The key to maximizing employee retention, though, isn’t to be reactive, only offering pay rises and promotions when workers threaten to walk out.
Rather, building a culture of retention is a holistically powerful method of making your company a place people actually want to stay and even recommend to other professionals. We’re going to explore some of the leadership strategies that can help you to implement this culture.
1. Investing in your Workforce
One of the key influencers of employee retention is the resources the company is willing to provide its workers. This isn’t just about salary, though that is important. By demonstrating willingness to invest in workers on multiple levels, your company is sending a clear message about how much it values its employees. As a result, you may see less turnover.
At Growth Hackers, we worked with a B2B SaaS company that expanded employee development programs and internal growth opportunities, resulting in a reduction in annual turnover and significantly higher retention among top performers.
Benefits
Solid benefits packages are an important part of compensation. They also have an emotional component, as the extent of benefits can often show that the company recognizes that workers have other needs than simply money. Benefits should certainly include the basics of health insurance and 401(k) matching. But it’s also worth considering elements that improve workers’ quality of life.
Paid vacation time (that the company actively encourages workers to use) is key to a good work-life balance. Subsidized access to gyms, entertainment, and therapy can also be positive for employees’ experiences in and outside of work. It can be worth seeing where your company can collaborate with local businesses on providing such benefits, too, as this builds community connections alongside access to useful resources.
Professional development
In many cases, employees don’t want to stay in exactly the same position they’re currently in for the rest of their working lives. Indeed, a recent Gallup study found that a lack of advancement, development, or career opportunities was among the top reasons people left their jobs. A meaningful way you demonstrate investment in your workers that boosts retention is to encourage their professional development.
This can include funding or subsidizing degree programs, providing access to e-Learning courses, and arranging mentorships. It’s also worth investing even those courses not directly related to your business, as this supports the employee’s individual interests while also bringing more diverse skill sets to your company.
Recognition
Your workers need to know that their commitment of time, energy, and talent is recognized by the business. When workers don’t feel regularly appreciated, they may become less engaged over time and even seek out employers who are more demonstrative.
Therefore, it’s vital to invest in a formal recognition program. This might include providing material rewards to workers who hit performance milestones or have been highlighted by colleagues as vital contributors. It can also include promotions and pay rises. Even verbal and written appreciation helps here. The key is to make the recognition consistent and specific.
At Growth Hackers, we worked with a growing software company where employees felt their contributions often went unnoticed, and after implementing peer recognition, milestone rewards, and manager appreciation initiatives, retention improved while employee morale strengthened significantly. At Growth Hackers, we practice what we preach and this is why we implemented a recognition program internally where our top performers get recognized. This happens 3 times a year (Every 4 months).
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2. Strengthening Employee Relationships
Relationships at work are important to retention. This doesn’t necessarily mean that every worker is looking for their colleagues to also be a part of their personal lives. Nevertheless, feeling meaningfully connected to those employees they work alongside and confident that there are mutual support networks can be a powerful reason to stay with a business. Not to mention that being around people who make work a bit more enjoyable can make workers’ experiences more positive.
At Growth Hackers, we supported a manufacturing firm where strengthening employee relationships acted like weaving stronger threads through an organization, helping reduce feelings of isolation and improving retention. So, how can you strengthen employee relationships?
Firstly, it’s as simple as providing opportunities for everyone to get to know one another a little better. This can involve arranging fun activities, such as field days or quiz nights. Wherever possible, make these full-company events in which any teams you create involve members from different departments. This provides opportunities for people to get to know colleagues they wouldn’t usually interact with, potentially deepening their connections to the wider business.
Particularly in a landscape that is seeing rising remote and hybrid operations, it’s also important to use methods to improve employee relationships that are effective no matter where employees are working from. One option is to intentionally pair team members on occasional projects.
This minimizes the potential for workers to feel isolated and can gain appreciation for one another’s skill sets. Adapting communication styles to enable equal engagement from remote and in-person team members (like utilizing virtual white boards for ideation and messaging channels for chatting) can also help everyone feel more connected.
3. Demonstrating Authentic Corporate Social Responsibility
The ethics of your organization are a vital part of its culture. Alongside ensuring positive and responsible operations, it can also contribute to employees choosing whether to remain with your organization. A company that acts unethically, or even doesn’t demonstrate that responsible actions are a priority, is unlikely to be one that workers want to be a part of for very long. After all, the ethics of the businesses employees engage with can feel like a reflection of their own values. Therefore, you should consider adopting authentic corporate social responsibility (CSR) measures essential.
Environmental sustainability
At the moment, one of the key focuses of CSR is environmental sustainability. As the challenges of climate change and other environmental issues are becoming more prominent, employees are more cognizant of how businesses are contributing.
Therefore it’s vital for your company to adopt a range of sustainability measures beyond simply investing in carbon offsetting credits. You could reduce the environmental impact of your buildings by adopting smart heating, air conditioning, and lighting controls that improve energy efficiency. Circular economy practices that boost the lifespan of your products through minimizing waste, returning raw materials to the earth through composting, and responsible inventory management are also impactful.
Mindful partnerships
The ethical duties of your business are not limited to what goes on inside its walls. The choices of partners (whether external contractors, service providers, or supply chain businesses) also impact your CSR efforts. If your employees feel that you’re collaborating with companies that make irresponsible decisions simply because these partners offer cheaper services, they may well lose faith in your organization.
Therefore, it’s vital to review the ethical and social values of your partners both prior to engaging with them and throughout the lifespan of your collaboration. This should include attention to green activities, the treatment of workers, and impact on communities, among other elements.
Community causes
Businesses are important contributors to communities through employment and the economy. One component of CSR that may impact retention is to keep finding ways to be a positive influence on the communities that your workers are connected to.
This should include reaching out to your workforce for suggestions about initiatives and organizations they feel are important and would like the company to support. This could be through donations of money, products or services, or providing workers with paid time off to volunteer for initiatives.
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4. Boosting Inclusivity
It’s certainly difficult to retain workers who don’t feel welcome in and meaningfully part of the company. Genuine inclusivity of all workers is not just an ethical duty of companies, but also a business imperative. After all, alongside minimizing turnover, your genuine support of people from a diverse range of backgrounds gives the enterprise access to perspectives that may spark innovation. It’s in everyone’s best interests for your company to commit to genuine inclusivity.
Remember that inclusivity isn’t just about hiring people from a range of ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic identities. You also need to make certain that your company culture is practically and emotionally supportive of people regardless of their backgrounds. Your actions here can include:
- Communicating openly with workers: From the outset of onboarding, make it clear to each worker that the company is keen to support them. Provide them with opportunities to talk about what about the workplace they can find challenging or the types of micro-aggressions they may have faced in the past. This is key to ensuring the workplace can be a space in which their experiences are as positive as possible.
- Building employee resource groups: Employee resource groups (ERGs) are committees that are usually formed of workers from similar backgrounds. These are voluntary and employee-led groups that are committed to ensuring mutual support, helping workers to gain needed resources, and raising areas for improvement with company leadership. Making time and space available for these groups and collaborating with them on taking positive action helps make your culture more inclusive.
- Educate your workforce: Many of the issues surrounding inclusivity stem from a lack of informed education. Some workers may not know that their behavior constitutes microaggression or what impact this has on colleagues. Some leaders may not treat certain forms of discrimination with the seriousness such actions deserve. Therefore, providing cultural sensitivity training is an essential part of ensuring mutually respective interactions that contribute to an inclusive workplace.
Above all else, your company must be open to making change and owning up to its missteps. Regularly check in with your workforce about what they feel your company could do to make them feel more included within your organization.
When issues occur, make announcements admitting to the problems alongside identifying what steps your company is taking to change for the better. This provides a sense of transparency that boosts trust among your workforce, which in itself influences retention.
Final Words on Building a Culture of Retention at your Company
A culture of retention is beneficial for everyone involved. It helps your business to keep great workers while providing a meaningful employee experience. This can include everything from providing resources that enable your workforce to thrive to ensuring your CSR efforts align with workers’ values.
Remember, though, that some of the elements that boost retention change over time. Opinions and priorities can shift. Therefore, you’ll need to regularly review the influencers of retention and make adjustments to your culture accordingly.
GrowthHackers is one of the most prominent growth hacking companies helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners foster a culture of retention, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales.
We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact GrowthHackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
