Why should we concern ourselves with employee retention? The cost for re-hiring is very high. It is much more cost-effective to keep your staff if possible.

Employee retention is a strategy that supports employees/staff to keep them engaged and productive with the company for a longer period of time. We not only need to take care of our customers but we also must make sure the people who serve our customers are happy and loyal.

Clearly, we should not retain staff members who are not performing at work, yet unplanned and frequent employee turnover is generally seen as bad for the business. It usually reflects bad management, poor compensation, or lack of proper selection. Hence, it is very important for an organization to have a manager to look after the staff’s needs or at least a dedicated program to determine staff engagement issues in an organization.

The following are the 3 commonly identified signs of employee disengagement:

1. Absenteeism and Tardiness – This is the most obvious sign of a staff member who lacks interest at work. Although sometimes there are emergencies that cannot be avoided, an absence once a week is a sure way to tell your staff is not motivated to work anymore.
2. Poor Quality of Work. Regular errors, lack of attention to detail, and low productivity are indicators of an unsatisfied staff member. It could be caused by personal problems or issues with management.
3. If you are getting complaints from the other staff members suffering from their colleague’s poor output or worse, if you are receiving complaints from your customers themselves, then you have a serious problem. The staff member concerned may be facing an unrealistic high workload or may need retraining. These issues should be addressed with urgency before the company starts losing clients.

So what are the negative implications of a high employee turnover?

1. Even for employers who hire virtual staff, there are still costs associated with hiring one. We dedicate time to training our employees as well as pay for their training to make sure they are effective at work. Hence, we cannot afford to keep losing quality workers. In addition to training, we also must consider the cost to market new openings, complete necessary background, reference checks during the recruitment process, and management’s time to select a new candidate.
2. The performance of the entire team can be greatly affected. If there are new people to be trained while the experienced ones are leaving, a lot of the tasks may not get done because the team is short-staffed to handle the current workload. Not to mention the quality assurance of the new staff members reduces the amount of work that can be accomplished.
3. Morale is the degree to which an employee feels good about his work environment. It is directly related to the success of the organization. A high morale team is likely to be much more productive, displays great performance and creativity in the workplace, has less absenteeism/ tardiness at work and encourages increased quality of work output. With teams with high turnover typically have staff that will most certainly be burned out as they shoulder the burden of their previous colleagues’ tasks and this can be demotivating.
4. Lower Knowledge Base. The constant change of employees means the average years of experience and background or employees are diminished. This means employees are less familiar with the tasks and are less effective in handling the customers.

Considering the points above, it is therefore, very important for an organization to come up with an effective employee retention strategy, implement them during onboarding and not wait until the issue arises.

As said by J.W. Marriott:

“If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers and your business will take care of itself”

Are you struggling to find the right employees/staff who are fit for your business needs? Are you in need of a professional to handle recruitment and employee retention? If your answer to both is yes, you can get started by booking your free consultation here.