Top tips for better retention

Understand retention

No employee stays with you forever. Whether it’s from moving to a new role or retiring from the workforce, every employee goes through a life cycle with you. Retention is a broad term that refers to how you go about keeping employees an employee with you for as long as possible. It’s important to get a handle on employee experience and engagement.

This is all connected to the employee life cycle, and understanding this cycle will help you maximise employee engagement.

There are five key stages of the employee life cycle:

1. Attract: where the potential new employee hears about you and wants to look into working with you
2. Onboarding: Where new hires are brought into your ecosystem and get to work
3. Engagement: This is where your employees will evaluate whether they’re happy and fulfilled at work
4. Development: Where employees are given space to progress their careers
5. Exit: The final chance for a good impression, this is how you treat employees when they decide to leave

Every stage is important and will factor into an employee’s experience. For example, it might be easy to dismiss the exit stage as unimportant. The employee has already decided to go somewhere else, so why would you need to treat them well? But a poor exit will sour your relationship, making them less likely to become a boomerang employee and more likely to talk poorly about you to other people. That can do lasting damage to your ‘attract’ phase, as your employer brand will take a hit.

A good experience at any stage will extend the length of time an employee wants to work with you, while a bad experience will make them more likely to look for new opportunities.

When it comes to retention, there are some key challenges that most organisations will need to contend with. If you don’t deal with these, you’ll quickly run into issues.

Firstly, compensation. It’s not the only reason an employee will quit, but according to the CIPD, 35% of employees will move for better pay and benefits. Competitive salaries are not a silver bullet to all your retention issues and other forms of compensation such as health insurance, pension support and discounts on products can often be more of a draw. However, it’s still important to keep an eye on salaries.

Secondly, recognition. Regular feedback will help an employee excel, and ensure they feel confident in their work. It also helps build trust between team members and management.

Thirdly, communication. It’s often said that people don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers. According to the CIPD, 30% of employees gave ‘unhappy with senior management’ as a key reason to change jobs. While you can’t always make popular decisions, communicating to your employees about those decisions is key to getting people on board.

Work/life balance is a critical challenge. Improving this isn’t just about offering remote work (and in fact, many employees find working from home can bleed into their personal time) although that could be a factor. It’s also about offering flexibility in other areas, ensuring employees don’t feel pressured to work out of hours, and that they’re not too pressured for too long.

Strategies for improving employee retention

There are many strategies to improve employee retention.

Onboarding often goes overlooked. This stage sets the tone for your employment.

Taking another look at your compensation strategy is also helpful. Remember: it’s not just wages but offering competitive benefits that your employees actually care about.

Surveys and other communication tools will help you get a handle on what your employees really think and need, so consider building these into any strategy.

However, one key way to improve employee retention is by looking into your learning offering. Let’s unpack that a little.

How enhancing learning boosts retention

Enhancing your learning offering is one of the best ways to improve retention. It affects every stage of the employee life cycle. Good learning and development (L&D) is a pull for potential new hires. When your learning is robust, onboarding is easier, and employees find it easier to engage with their day-to-day tasks. It ensures that employees feel like their careers are progressing even if there isn’t much upward mobility immediately available.

The best way to enhance your learning is by offering a learning experience platform (LXP), which will help you foster a learning culture. This ensures your people know that learning is valued and makes it easier to engage with learning content.

LXPs automate a lot of the admin of learning, ensuring you don’t put more of a burden on your HR or learning team. LXPs are also great at providing a vast range of learning material that suits a range of styles for maximum accessibility.

Final thoughts

Learning will have to become a core part of your strategy if you want to keep employees with you for the long haul. In addition to helping you overcome skills gaps, a strong learning strategy helps employees feel valued and gives them plenty of opportunities to develop.

If you’d like to learn more about how learning can help you and your organisation, then take a look at our skills gaps quiz. It will help you isolate the problems you are facing and find the perfect solution.