Employee retention is one of the most important aspects of establishing a fruitful and healthy business. Your staff are responsible for the fundamental activities of the business; including sales, marketing, planning, and customer satisfaction. Retaining employees can reduce the cost of hiring, or the loss of important expert knowledge. It also keeps your customers happy, and develops lifetime relationships between co-workers.

So how do you ensure your business has a long-term view of retaining the best talent? Here are 4 tactics to help you build a sustainable business that people love to work for.

 

Hire People Who Fit The Role, Team, and Organization

Employing the right person to a position in your company is one of the most important steps to retaining them in the long term. People crave a sense of purpose that relates to their personality and aspirations. Hiring the right person for your organization is not as simple as it sounds. There is a lot of contributing factors. Their career goals, their work experience, the way they mesh with your culture. Not to mention the importance of your hiring process, and how well you can use interviews and testing to identify the personal traits your business needs.

But the better you hire, the easier retention will be.

 

Create a Performance Review System Aligned to Individual Goals

A performance review system provides employers the opportunity to know how much employees contribute to the organisation. But they also provide an opportunity for individuals to set goals and carve a path for their careers.

When building your performance review system, it is important to align it to the goals of your employees, and see how you can better utilise their capacity to create a powerful work team. To make this successful, you need to develop an evaluation process, identify individual performance measures, set guidelines for feedback, and create disciplinary and termination procedures. But more importantly, when it comes to retaining your best employees long-term, you need to align this review process to rewards, salary increases, and career progression. That way everyone knows the game they are playing and how they can win. An effective performance review system can improve employee retention by helping you recognise and reward excellent performance, create an open dialogue, provide opportunity for growth, and ensure job clarity.

This leads us to the next point...

 

Reward Regularly and Generously

Everybody wants to feel appreciated and recognised for their hard work. Rewarding your employees, regularly and generously, brings out their best and makes them feel appreciated and happy in their role. Reports show that one-third of Irish employers offer a pay rise to retain their employees. However, It is not necessarily the monetary value of the reward that matters. There are a number of non-monetary incentives that drive employee satisfaction more so than a pay rise.

High-performance employees should be rewarded regularly and generously, with both monetary and non-monetary benefits, because it increases productivity, ensures job satisfaction, employee happiness, and builds a strong team culture.

 

Shape the Direction of the Role Based on the Individual

Each individual is different, and will respond to different incentives, rewards, and motivation techniques. If you find yourself with a great team of people, you should do everything you can to hold onto them. This may mean getting to know their personal goals, hobbies, lifestyle, and career drivers more intimately, and inevitably shaping roles to suit an individual’s desires. When someone outgrows one role, find another one for them. Even if you have to create a new role. Make it happen, because at the end of the day a great business is only as good as the people within it. As former CEO of Porsche, Peter Shutz, once famously said: “Hire character, train skill”.

This quote resonates and applies to employee retention just as much as it does to hiring new people.
Conclusion

Companies that retain their best employees have better opportunities to create a more successful and sustainable business. Your competitors will respect you, and your customers will enjoy long term relationships with employees they trust. You also save money on hiring, onboarding, training, and inevitably lost efficiency in the business.

How do you retain employees in your business? Let us know in the comments.