13 KEY RETENTION STRATEGIES

1 START WITH A SMART ON-BOARDING PROCESS

From their very first day, set up your new hires up for success with a thorough, well-planned on-boarding process. “Make sure that you aren't just teaching the new hire about their job role and responsibilities,” said Rea Regan, Marcom Manager at employee management company Connecteam. “It is just as important to teach them about the company culture and how they can thrive every single day. Lay out goals for them, for their first week, first month, first three months, first six months and their first year. Make sure they have every opportunity to talk with you about questions or issues they have, set them up with a mentor.” Patriot Software CEO Mike Kappel on Forbes.com wrote: “Done well, on-boarding can increase your employee retention rate. Done poorly, on-boarding can result in employees quitting within six months of starting.”

2 CREATE A MENTOR PROGRAMME

“Pair a new hire with a seasoned employee to ensure the greatest chance of employee retention,” wrote Regan. “Your veteran employee will act as their best resource and vice-versa. The new hire can offer fresh eyes and a new perspective on how things are done. However, make sure the mentor doesn't act like a supervisor. Instead, they are there for new hires to lean on, to be a sounding board, and to welcome them to the company culture.”

Mentor programmes have a quantifiable impact on retention. A study by mentoring software company MentorcliQ found a 13% retention increase among employees who have participated in just one mentoring relationship. “Bump that up to two mentoring relationships and retention increases by 18%,” said MentorcliQ Senior Success Coach Nate Ward. “Of employees with two years or less at their current organisation, the turnover rate for those without a mentor is 26%, but for new employees with a mentor that number drops to 8%.”

3 PROVIDE THOUGHTFUL, PROFESSIONAL FEEDBACK ON A REGULAR BASIS

A Society for Human Resource Management survey of managers found that only 2% were providing quarterly or ongoing feedback to employees. People crave feedback, and they need it more than once or twice a year. They want recognition of their efforts and advice on how to improve. (See sidebar on the impact of feedback.)

4 FOCUS ON THE 5% WHO DELIVER 95% OF THE VALUE

Some employees disproportionately create or protect value. In a world of constrained resources, companies should focus their efforts on the few critical areas where the best people have the biggest impact.

5 CREATE AN EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION (EVP)

An EVP is what employees get for what they give. What do you expect them to “give” in terms of time, effort, experience, ideas. What will they “get” in terms of tangible rewards, the way leadership helps employees, and the substance of the work. “If your EVP is truly stronger than the competition's, you will attract and retain the best talent,” wrote Keller and Meaney. “But for three reasons, few companies have EVPs that meaningfully help them win this war:

1 The EVP is not distinctive: Stand out for something. Be unique in some way that reflects your special mission and your culture.

2 The EVP is not targeted: While it's great to have an overall EVP, it's most important to have a winning EVP for the 5% of roles that matter most. If, for example, data scientists are hugely important, you'll want an EVP that lets them invent things, offers a clear, rapid career progression, and helps them have a big impact.

3 The EVP is not real: “An attractive EVP cooked up by HR and pushed through PR used to help secure the best talent,” wrote Keller and Meaney. “In the long term, however, this was always a losing proposition, since great people would quickly become disillusioned if the reality didn't measure up.”

6 SHUT UP AND LISTEN. REGULARLY.

“We surveyed 13,551 employees for our 2020 Global Employee Experience Trends report and found that regular listening has a huge impact on employee engagement and employee retention,” wrote Catherine Thurtle, a content strategist for experience management company Qualtrics. “For example, engagement rises to 61% for those whose company has a feedback programme, compared to 45% for those without.”

Gaining engagement through listening pays big dividends: Highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their companies than their less engaged counterparts, according to Qaultrics.

“If you wait until an exit interview to find out why a valuable employee has decided to move on, you've missed a golden opportunity — not just to keep a productive member of your team but to identify and fix issues within your organisation before you lose others,” wrote Rea Regan, the Marcom Manager at Connecteam. “Instead, touching base with employees about what motivates them while they're still on staff is part of a key strategy in gaining an edge in today's tight talent market: employee retention.”

7 BUT ACT ON THE RESULTS OF LISTENING, OR ELSE…

“Don't bother asking for feedback if you're not going to analyse and act on the results,” wrote Thurtle. “That can cause more harm than not asking at all. Why? Because then you're not really listening. “Your people will soon lose faith with the process if they don't see changes being implemented,” she wrote. “There's very little in (and out) of the workplace that is as demoralising as being ignored.”

8 IT’S NOT ABOUT ALL THE PERKS, BUT THE RIGHT ONES

Don't presume to know what perks your people want. Use the listening sessions to find out, and then try to offer the right ones. Doing that enables you to save money on under-utilised benefits AND create a better employee experience.

According to a study by LinkedIn, employees actually care most about healthcare coverage, PTO (paid time off), and flexibility. You could also offer working remote options, unlimited paid time off, help with daycare expenses, or time-shifting as a policy.

9 HELP YOUR PEOPLE GROW; PROMOTE FROM WITHIN

Ninety-four per cent of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers, according to LinkedIn's 2018 Workforce Learning Report. For 86% of millennials, offering career training and development would keep them from leaving, according to a survey by employee development company Bridge.

The number one driver of employee engagement is having opportunities for growth, according to the Qualtrics 2020 Global Employee Experience Trends report. “Promoting from within not only provides a clear path to greater compensation and responsibility, it also helps employees feel that they're valued and a crucial part of the company's success,” wrote Regan. High-skills training and professional development programmes to hone soft skills are perceived among the top benefits for retaining employees' services over the next five years, according to research from the Consumer Technology Association. “Whether by corporate training to help foster the acquisition of new skills, new technologies or new processes, or through tuition reimbursement for outside courses, furthering your employees' education can help them feel valued and invested in the company,” Dan Pickett, CEO of managed services firm Nfrastructure, told Qualitrics.

10 BE MORE FAMILY FRIENDLY

If we are not family friendly, we are driving away people who could make a difference. For example, “43% of highly qualified women with children are leaving careers or off-ramping for a period of time,” according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her best-selling book Lean In. Many never return from maternity leave because their companies do not offer flexible work environments or on-site daycare facilities.

11 REGULARLY LOOK AT YOUR PAY RATES V. OTHER MEDIA COMPANIES

No matter how gung-ho your employees may be, they still want to be paid fairly. Only one in five employees feels like they are fairly paid, according to a study by compensation software and data company PayScale. The irony is that “ultimately it could cost you more to find another employee than it would to simply give them a pay raise,” according to Thurtle. “Not to mention the knowledge drain that comes with losing a valuable employee.”

To ensure your salaries are competitive, use third party data to get market rates in each speciality and compare them what you're offering. Also, watch out for gender pay gaps.

12 ENCOURAGE A WORK-LIFE BALANCE

“We recommend taking feedback and suggestions from staff regularly to find out what matters to them most, and what's negatively (and positively) affecting their work-life balance,” wrote Thurtle. “As well as collecting ideas, you can measure staff responses against indicators of employee experience like intention to stay and eagerness to go to work each morning. Doing this will point towards the deeper relationships between work-life-balance factors.”

13 START PROJECTS WITH “STOP”

One of the speediest ways to depress morale and push employees toward the exit door is to pile new projects on top of old ones without removing any existing responsibilities.

“There is no better way to crush the spirit of innovation than to bring together a group of creative thinkers, turn them loose to brainstorm, allow them to become excited about implementing some of these innovations … and then require them to add new projects to their existing workloads,” wrote Frank Mungeam, a professor at the Knight-Cronkite News Lab at Arizona State University.

“There is no ‘free time' today. Adding new activities without eliminating other tasks is a surefire way to sabotage a promising innovation,” he wrote. “That's why smart managers start their innovation process by brainstorming a ‘Stop Doing' list before they generate a ‘Start Doing' list,” wrote Mungeam. “They create capacity for innovation first. “The ‘Stop Doing' list should include its best friend and neighbour, the ‘Do Differently' list”. “Together, they offer a potent path to creating capacity for new innovation.”