18 Tips to Help You Reduce Employee Turnover

Are you looking for tips to help you reduce employee turnover? Competitive salary and benefits, flexible schedule options, the ability to work from home when necessary, workplace environment and employee treatment, and tuition assistance are five basics in employee retention. Especially for millennial employees, these are the holy grail for recruitment and reducing employee turnover.

Tips for Reducing Employee Turnover

Reducing employee turnover is dependent on the total work environment you offer for employees. Employees thrive when the work environment supports them in attaining their goals and dreams. The best employees for your organization share your vision and values about what they want to experience at work.

These recommendations about reducing employee turnover are also common-sense, basic and incredibly hard to find in organizations today. Wonder why this is so? It's because many organizations have not figured out that valuing employees is a win-win for employers and employees. Valuing employees is also a win for reducing key employee turnover.

• Select the right people in the first place through behavior-based testing and competency screening. Sure, an onsite interview gives you a feel for whether the person can fit within your culture, but your key to selecting the best employees is to determine how well they can do the job. The right person, in the right seat, on the right bus is the starting point.
• At the same time, don't neglect to hire people with the innate talent, ability, and smarts to work in almost any position even if you don't currently have the best match available.

• Offer an attractive, competitive, comprehensive benefits package with components such as life insurance, disability insurance and flexible hours. One young employee whose stated reason for accepting a job offer was the availability of a 401(k) match is not the exception. Research on Millennials and money indicates that they do not want to repeat the mistakes of their parents. Better benefits packages reduce employee turnover.
• Provide opportunities for people to share their knowledge on-the-job via training sessions, presentations, mentoring others and team assignments. Employees like to share what they know; the act of teaching others ensures the employee's own learning. Training others is the best indicator of learning.
• Demonstrate respect for employees at all times. Listen to them deeply; use their ideas; never ridicule or shame them. Via your communication, share that you value them.
• Offer performance feedback and praise good efforts and results to reduce employee turnover. Your recognition of employee contributions is your most powerful form of employee reinforcement and retention. People want to know that their work matters and makes a difference.
• People want to enjoy their work. Make work fun. Engage and employ the special talents of each individual. A day without laughter should be abnormal for employees.
• Enable employees to balance work and life. Allow flexible starting times, core business hours and flexible ending times. (Yes, his son's soccer game is as important as work.)
• Involve employees in decisions that affect their jobs and the overall direction of the company whenever possible. Involve them in the discussion about company vision, mission, values, and goals. This strategic framework will never live for them or become owned by them if they merely read it in email or hanging on the wall.
• Recognize excellent performance, and especially, link pay to performance to reduce employee turnover. Your key employees are motivated when their above-average efforts are recognized and rewarded.

• Base the upside of bonus potential on the success of both the employee and the company and make it limitless within company parameters. (As an example, pay 10 percent of corporate profits to employees.)
• Recognize and celebrate success. Mark their passage as important goals are achieved. Bring in pizza or breakfast to celebrate reaching milestones and turn the occasion into a brief ceremony while you celebrate success.
• Staff adequately so overtime is minimized for those who don't want it and people don't wear themselves out. You will discover that salaried employees who are engaged and excited will work the hours necessary to get their jobs done.
• Nurture and celebrate organization traditions. Have a costume party every Halloween. Run a food collection drive every November. Pick a monthly charity to help. Have an annual company dinner at a fancy hotel.
• Provide opportunities within the company for cross-training and career progression. People like to know that they have room for career movement. This is a serious deterrent to employee turnover if the employee has a career path that excites them.
• Provide the opportunity for career and personal growth through training and education, challenging assignments and more responsibility.
• Communicate goals, roles, and responsibilities so that people know what is expected and they feel like part of the in-crowd.
• According to research by the Gallup organization, encourage employees to have good, even best, friends, at work. This will increase their commitment to you as an employer.
• Now that you have the list that will reduce employee turnover, why not work to make your organization one of the few, the best, that truly honors and appreciates employees.