How to ensure happy and loyal employees who wont leave you and want to work for you! Six simple strategies to ensure your workers stick around.
We recently published an article on how to ensure you have happy and loyal customers. And while this is important, it’s perhaps more important to have happy and loyal employees. If your employees don’t enjoy working for you, they’ll soon leave for another job. This leads to a lack of experience within your organization and resources wasted on hiring new staff. To keep this from happening, below are six simple strategies you can use to ensure your employees are happy and stick around.
Provide Fair Compensation
First and foremost, you should examine the compensation you’re providing to your employees. Salary is one of the biggest considerations people make when they determine where they want to work. If a business similar to your own is offering a better salary, it will be tempting for your employees to leave. At the same time, they won’t enjoy working for you as much, knowing they aren’t being paid a fair wage. Perform a compensation analysis of similar businesses in your industry to make sure you’re providing an adequate wage for your entire team.
Create an Enjoyable Work Environment
The next thing you can focus on is your employee’s environment. For example, if you have an office space, is it conducive to productive work? Is it a comfortable place to work, or do your employees dread showing up every day? No one wants to spend their days in an unpleasant environment, no matter how much they’re being paid.
Take some time to analyze the environment you’ve created for your team and whether it could use some changes. Perhaps introducing some more natural light could cheer people up, or playing some music throughout the day. You can also do things like relaxing the dress code, adding fun team-building activities, or even allowing your employees to work from home.
Recognize Hard Work
Another key factor in creating loyal employees is recognizing their hard work. Many managers believe that paying someone is enough to garner their best efforts. However, this isn’t always the case. Most people want to know their hard work is appreciated beyond receiving a check every two weeks.
Putting some effort into recognizing your employees’ hard work and achievements can go a long way and doesn’t cost a lot of time or money. For instance, you could simply send out a company-wide email when an employee reaches a milestone with your business, such as working there for ten years. Or you could create some employee awards and give them out for achievements like top salesperson or best customer service record. Little things like this show your employees that you care and value their contributions.
Provide Benefits Beyond the Monetary
Even if you’re providing your employees with a competitive salary, you may need to provide them additional benefits if you want to keep them around. People consider benefits like paid time off, health insurance, and other company programs when determining where they want to work. If your competitor offers more benefits and a similar salary, your employees may want to leave.
A good way to learn what benefits your employees want is by simply asking them. Conduct interviews or pass around a survey asking about what benefits your team would like to see. You can also investigate businesses similar to your own to learn the most common types of benefits. Once you set up these benefit programs, you’ll be able to keep your team around longer and attract better talent to your company.
Inspect Your Onboarding Process
Many people who leave a job do so within the first few weeks. One of the major reasons for this is a poor onboarding process. When an employee doesn’t receive the training or resources they need at the start of a job, this can quickly lead to stress or the feeling that the person is not a right fit for the job.
To improve your employee retention rate, especially if people are leaving your organization shortly after you hire them, fix your onboarding process. Talk to current staff about what they wish they had during onboarding and frequently follow up with new employees to ensure they have everything they need. Doing so will help to ensure you’re not wasting all the resources that go into hiring a new team member.
Set a Strong Example
Finally, make sure you’re setting a strong example for your team. If you, as a leader, show up to work in a bad mood, this will impact the rest of your staff. Similarly, you need to show that you enjoy working for this business and that you’re willing to work hard to make the business a success. Failure to do this will give employees the leeway to act the same and may make their jobs less enjoyable.
