It costs the average company more than $1,250 to train a new employee. This figure doesn’t include the financial impact that lost efficiency can have on your business.
Retaining a higher percentage of your employees will help you avoid this fate. As your turnover rate goes down, your team’s efficiency and cohesion typically will rise. You also won’t have to worry about paying to train new employees as frequently.
This article will highlight four reasons why a company may have a high turnover rate and provide solutions to ensure the problems don’t impact your business. Keep reading to learn more.
4 major factors of a high turnover rate
A toxic work culture of overwork
Results from at least one recent survey show that 82% of employees feel overworked. Your employees may feel the same way if you’re constantly asking them to pick up extra responsibilities without extra pay, or asking them to work late at night or on the weekend on a regular basis.
When you’re running a business, it’s easy to fall into the trap of looking at your workers as resources, rather than people. But, of course, your employees are humans with human emotions that need to be respected.
If it helps, you can also think about this from a resources perspective. Your employees are the most valuable resource that you have. How much care do you put into protecting your other valuable resources, such as your building or private data? You should put the same amount of attention into ensuring that your employees stay happy.
Little feedback or recognition of value
All of your employees bring value to your company in one way or another. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t keep them employed.
But as a business owner, it’s easy to focus exclusively on the negative. If you have a large company, your only interaction with an employee may be to tell them what they’re doing wrong. That kind of exclusive focus on the negative can lead to resentment. And when resentment festers, the employee may leave your company for another opportunity.
Providing feedback and recognizing an employee’s value costs you nothing. But it can prevent the scenario we’ve just described above from happening so that your turnover rates don’t spike.
No opportunity for professional growth
The vast majority of employees won’t be happy staying in the same job with the same level of pay for their entire careers. It’s human nature to want to grow, expand, and improve. If your business doesn’t make this possible for its workers, they may start looking for opportunities to grow elsewhere.
One of the best policies that you can institute for this is hiring from within. This has a few benefits.
First, your employees will feel that they have ample room for professional growth at your business so they won’t need to look elsewhere for it. Additionally, your employees will be incentivized to work harder and do more in order to achieve their professional goals at your company.
Many companies that do a good job of focusing on professional growth have internal development plans for employees. Bringing these to your business will help each member of your team feel like they’re on track to achieve their goals.
Poor hiring
Ever company is different. Some workers may be very qualified for one of your positions on paper. But they may be a poor fit for your culture based on factors like their working style and how they see their career progressing.
This is why you also need to focus on your hiring practices if you want to reduce your turnover rates. Try to think more about cultural fit when hiring new employees. If you can find someone who meshes will with your team and its work style, they’ll be much likelier to be happy enough with their new position to stay with your company for longer.
4 ways to combat a high turnover rate
Be considerate of work/life balance
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a shift in the workforce that had been building for some time. An increasing number of employees now prefer to work from home full time or follow a hybrid model that gives them some days at home and some in the office.
This may or may not be a realistic solution for your business based on what you do. But offering that kind of flexibility to your employees may be one of the best things that you can do to retain a higher percentage of them.
Your workers have lives outside of the office. You don’t always have to be 100% accommodating to their wishes. But the more often you can be flexible for them, the likelier they are to want to stay at your company.
Reward your employees for their work
There are a lot of factors that go into someone’s decision-making process as they choose where to work. But few are as universally important as pay. Ultimately, if you want to retain as high of a percentage of your workforce as possible, paying fair salaries to your team members will be an important part of that process.
That being said, not all rewards are financial. The act of rewarding an employee could also involve recognizing them publicly for a job well done, taking them out for a nice lunch, or something else that you know they would appreciate.
The idea here is to help your employees feel like the hard work they put into completing their responsibilities is recognized and rewarded.
Invest in your employees’ success
It’s one thing to talk about wanting your employees to grow and succeed, and another thing entirely to back those words up financially. Investing in your employees’ success will help them feel truly valued and empowered by your company.
Of course, it can be difficult to justify spending a significant amount of money on anything. But the decision may become easier to make if you compare the costs of investing in your employees’ success against the cost of training new employees.
If you can invest in sales enablement tools that empower your team to perform better, it may be enough to keep some workers on your team for longer. And that could help you save thousands on training costs.
The best tools for your employees’ success will vary based on the work they do. For example, if they frequently lead video calls, investing in a video call teleprompter app like VODIUM could help them stay on topic and say what they mean to say on a more consistent basis in those meetings.
Be Transparent
Every business owner has to make difficult decisions from time to time. The choices that they make are typically very well reasoned, even if the outcome of those choices is unfavorable to certain groups of employees.
But when you make a decision that’s tough for your employees to hear, they may not know all of the factors that went into your decision-making process. They may also not realize that you plan on reversing the changes as soon as possible, or that you plan on taking some other action to mitigate the pain.
This is why it pays to be transparent with your team. Try to let them know that you're thinking when you have to make difficult decisions. Doing so will help them understand why you make the choices that you do, which could help reduce the number of workers that become disillusioned when these decisions need to be made.
You may even want to get into the habit of seeking input from your employees before making an important decision that will impact them. Ensuring that your team feels like its voice has been heard can do wonders for retention.
That being said, if you’re going to seek your employees’ feedback, you need to act on it at least some of the time. Otherwise, workers will quickly pick up on the fact that you’re not truly listening to what they have to say.
Give your employees the right tools like VODIUM
In today’s age of remote work and video conferencing, new challenges have emerged for employees. For the first time, workers are needing to figure out how to keep others engaged on video apps without losing track of their thoughts.
VODIUM’s teleprompter software makes this much easier to do.
Our lightweight tool will pop up on your employees’ screens to keep them on track throughout their video meetings. That way, they don’t have to go back and forth between their notes, which would likely lead to them disrupting their audience’s focus.But we don’t expect you to just take our word for it.
You can try VODIUM for free today to experience the value we offer for yourself with no risk.
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