How Can Companies Reduce Employee Turnover And Retain Top Talent

Employee turnover is a major threat to any business. Not only does it impact the morale of your remaining employees, but high turnover also disrupts your business’ productivity, adds costs, and undermines your reputation as an employer.

By making an effort to understand your employees’ needs and struggles, you can find the root cause of your turnover rate and address it with the right solutions.

In this article, we tackle the major issue of employee turnover: why is it important, how can you address it, and what are possible solutions for you to attract and retain the most valuable talent?

Why You Can’t Let Employee Turnover Run Rampant

Employee turnover doesn’t end at having to find and train a new employee to replace the previous one that has left. Your organization could be at risk of losing organizational knowledge and expertise if your high turnover rate is not properly addressed. Having to constantly bid goodbye to their colleagues also affects your employees’ morale.

Let’s take a look at some alarming effects if you don’t properly address your employee turnover:

Reduced Productivity

As employees leave, your organization is left with fewer people to carry the workload. Not only that, their workflow might be disrupted as the remaining employees onboard their new colleague before they could kick into high gear again.

Loss of Organizational Knowledge and Expertise

A high turnover rate means organizational knowledge, expertise, and experience might be lost along the way. This is especially the case if the turnover rate stems from experienced employees leaving and is so high that a thorough handover cannot be done.

Reduced Team Morale and Trust

Constantly having to see their colleagues depart can leave a psychological impact on your remaining employees, wearing down their morale and trust in the stability and the security of their jobs, as well as the organization as a whole.

Increased Costs

Hiring and training new employees can require a lot of resources. When the process is repeated more than necessary, the hiring process could eat up your organization’s resources and budgets for other aspects of human resources management.

Careful Approach to Address Employee Turnover

Although your first instinct might be to scramble for a solution as soon as you see the trend picking up, high turnover is an issue worth spending your time and effort to identify a truly meaningful solution.

Your employees may be dissatisfied with their pay grades, or they are looking for an employer with more comprehensive insurance coverage. Sometimes, the problem might not be your company’s remuneration or benefits package at all.

If the root cause of your high turnover rate stems from the work environment, interpersonal relationships inside the team, or a lack of career advancement opportunities, an overhauled benefits package may not necessarily do the trick.

Consider spending time understanding your employees, whether through exit interviews, stay interviews (interviews with employees who have been with you for a long time), anonymous questionnaires, or focus group discussions. 

By thoroughly understanding the context of your turnover rate and the factors that prompt your employees to leave or stay, you can spend your time and resources on solutions that will truly work for your situation.

Possible Solutions to Reduce Turnover and Retain Your Top Talents

The best solution for your employee turnover will likely depend on the context of your turnover rate and the nature of your organization. Still, there are some common solutions you can consider when tackling your company’s turnover rate:

Provide Career Development Opportunities

The lack of career development is often one of the main factors that lead employees to change their jobs. By providing a clear career path and career development opportunities, you can keep employees engaged and even foster in-house growth.

Ensure Work-Life Balance is in Place

Fatigue and career burnout are the next common factors for employees to leave their jobs. Make sure your employees have sufficient opportunities to wind down and recharge their productivity.

This can be achieved through measures such as sufficient personal leaves, family leaves and childcare support for employees with children, flexible work arrangement, and the introduction of outcome-based evaluation.

Cater to Your Employees’ Wellbeing Needs

Nothing attracts top talent like the atmosphere that they could feel cared for and supported in, both in a professional and private sense. This could come in the form of a comprehensive insurance package, an Employee Assistance Program, or financial wellness resources.

The key is to make sure your benefits offerings align with your employees’ needs and truly matter to their satisfaction. To achieve this, some have embraced a flexible benefits model that can cater to employees of different ages and different needs.

Learn more about how flexible benefits can drive employees’ satisfaction.

Cultivate Healthy and Positive Work Culture

Toxic work culture drives talent away and impacts your remaining employees’ wellbeing, mental and physical. Make sure your employees have a channel they can safely voice their concerns if your company’s values are abused.

Recognize and Reward Your Employees’ Hard Work

Tying back to our previous point that employees want to feel cared for and supported, there is no other way to show your support like recognizing and rewarding their hard work. This can be in the form of financial or non-financial rewards like public and personal appreciation, additional time off, or a flexible workday.

Conclusion

Employee turnover, when left unaddressed, can undermine your organization’s productivity, expertise, reputation, and morale, among other things. When tackling the matters of turnover rate, it is best to first understand the actors that drive your employees away as well as keep them with you.

Once you could truly contextualize the root cause of the turnover, you could introduce measures to address it accordingly. This could take the form of financial or non-financial measures. 

If your employees are leaving for positions with better payment or more generous benefits, you might need a pay structure or benefits offering overhaul. This does not mean you must up your benefits spending immediately.

Consider performing an audit of your benefits offering. You might have certain benefits that are underutilized yet take up a large amount of your benefits spending. Meanwhile, you might have a benefit offering that could already meet the needs of your employees but it is not sufficiently communicated to them.

Pacific Prime helps companies, small and big, review their benefits offerings and broker benefits solutions that deliver on their business goals and budgets. Contact Pacific Prime employee benefits experts today for a free benefits review and personalized, tech-enabled employee benefits and group insurance solutions.