Employee turnover has continued its steady rise in recent years, landing at 18% for 2021. For businesses, high turnover rates mean more costs sunk in recruitment and onboarding, lost talent, and degradation of workplace culture.

Luckily, you can take steps to avoid having employees depart from your workplace at such rapid rates. According to Work Institute, over 75% of employees that left could have been retained by providing services and benefits related to enhancing the employee experience. These services may include employee engagement initiatives or more readily available opportunities for career progression within the organization. As of June 2022, there are two million fewer workers in the United States compared to February 2020, despite an unprecedented 3.8 million jobs created in 2021. As a result, the job market is more competitive than ever. For employers- this is why it’s essential for business success to find good employees and a way to keep them working with your company.

Decreasing Employee Attrition Step by Step

In today’s climate, retaining employees is more critical than ever. Of course, it’s more than just great pay and benefits, but that helps. To keep your employees, you must provide competitive compensation, a great workplace culture, avenues for growth, engaging work, and allowing your employees agency. In addition, these factors must work in unison to provide an attractive place for your employees to spend their lives and careers. So, where are you supposed to begin?

Find the Right Hire

Filling your organization with quality employees is where increasing employee retention begins. However, before you start working on decreasing your turnover, you must first find employees worth retaining. There are several steps you can take to find the right employees.

Solidify Your Needs

What type of position are you looking to fill? Solidifying your needs and manifesting them in an accurate job description can go a long way in finding the right hire and attracting candidates with the most applicable skills and experience.

The solidification of your needs as a business will also help you find the right employee to fit those needs. For example, what skills are needed for the position that you aren’t willing to budge on? The job search always requires a certain amount of flexibility, but it’s equally important to identify the attributes of a potential employee that you are not willing to compromise.

Do Your Research

Just as you expect any of your candidates to be well-researched in your company and industry, it’s essential that you, as the employer, stay up-to-date on current trends within the job market and your industry as a whole. Remain knowledgeable about market rates for employee salaries, hiring practices, and candidate availability so you can act quickly and appropriately to accommodate any changes in the job market. In addition, remaining agile within the market is a great way to get a head start on other businesses in your industry when expanding your workforce.

Hold Effective Interviews

The final step in making the right hire is holding an effective interview. To do this, it’s a good idea to get creative. Unfortunately, interviewers can get into the habit of making their interview the same social checklist for every candidate, resulting in an ineffective interview that leaves them unsure still if the person they’re about to hire is the correct fit. To avoid this common pitfall, you must take steps to diversify your interviewing technique and remain agile to individualize every interview for the candidate you’re interviewing. Some methods for increasing your interviewing effectiveness:

• Get up. It’s a long-known fact that standing increases engagement. Unfortunately, most interviews are still conducted in a stuffy office or through video. While the latter sometimes cannot be avoided, in-person interviews can benefit from leaving the office. This naturally increases engagement in both the interviewer and interviewee; you will also be able to see job candidates in a more realistic setting- whether walking through the office or meeting at a location not on the business site. Plus, getting out of the office in an interview helps you see more of the candidate and how they interact with the world.
• Get creative with questions. Asking candidates about their resumes is a great way to see them contextualize their achievements and experiences, but you should find more innovative lines of questioning. For example, instead of asking the tried and true, ask them to describe their favorite attribute. These largely serve the purpose, but asking candidates questions they haven’t answered for decades is a more effective way of getting familiar with their personality.

Promote a stress-free environment.  It’s true that an interview is the last test to see if a candidate is fit to work for your company or not- this is a naturally stressful situation for any individual interested in working with you. There’s no need to add to that stress by being uptight or unclear about the interview and its arrangements. Help your candidates de-stress by providing information before the interview regarding dress code, their interviewer, and the interview process itself.

Offer Competitive and Appropriate Benefits

Improving employee retention continues with building a competitive and alluring benefits package appropriate for the position and experience level you’re hiring. Offering good benefits consists of more than just competitive pay- it includes dental insurance, vision insurance, paid time off, sick leave, and other components that come together to make a comprehensive package. By offering compensation at or above the market for the experience you’re looking for, you immediately become an attractive destination for the top candidates in your industry. It’s more than that, though- offering competitive compensation shows your employees that you value their health and the skills they bring to your company. Once you’ve built a competitive benefits package, you must prepare for the future and build a pay structure that is prepared for growth. Read more about this in our whitepaper on the subject.

Remain Flexible Following the Pandemic