What Can You Do About High Turnover?

Turnover represents a frustrating and expensive drain on corporate resources. It’s also a team killer. High turnover can sap overall morale and cause significant delays to key projects.

Building a strong team isn’t just about recruiting. It’s about retention as well. Once you land a great employee, you have to be able to keep them for the long term. Otherwise, you’re constantly rebooting your team and stifling your progress.

Fighting turnover requires a multi-faceted approach. Unless you have unlimited resources (or at least Amazon-levels of available cash), you need to get clever with your tactics. You have to cut off reasons for people to leave, providing value for your employees, and cementing your relationship with each team member.

Here are some of the specific steps you can take to combat high turnover:

Higher Wages

Crass as it may seem, any turnover conversation starts with an employee’s paycheck. That’s where they are going to begin their considerations if they have a job switch on their mind.

If your workers can make significantly more at another company, it will be hard to keep them. However, that doesn’t mean that everybody deserves a raise. Rather, you have to remain competitive or continually face scraping the bottom of the recruitment barrel.

Better Benefits

Paychecks represent the main form of compensation for any employee. However, they are only part of the story. Any package includes other benefits as well, from retirement to health care to vacation time to various other perks.

Make sure these parts are competitive, as well. You might offer a market-beating salary. But if you fall short on the other aspects, you might see employees tempted by the better benefits provided by the competition.

Improved Work Environment

Work isn’t just a way to earn a paycheck. It’s also the place we spend most of our waking hours. It matters whether that time passes pleasantly, or whether each day feels like a stint in a gulag.

A little investment in the overall work environment can pay enormous dividends in employee satisfaction. It can be surprising how much a clean, comfortable workplace, stocked with a few amenities, will bolster morale.

Inspire Through Culture

People want to feel a higher purpose. For work, they are often happy just to collect a paycheck. But given a choice, they’d rather work to contribute to something loftier.

Corporate culture provides a way for you to tap into this desire. By orienting your work towards grander goals, you can motivate people to better performance and encourage them to stay with you longer.

Start Planning at the Hiring Stage

Don’t start thinking about turnover when people leave. Instead, begin building the framework for improved retention from the beginning of a worker’s tenure.

From the moment they are hired, develop a long-term relationship with each employee. Identify your top talent and fast-track their rise through the ranks. Better training and a personal touch can go a long way in reducing turnover rates.

If you do face a departure, you want to limit the impact on your overall business. You want to bring in a competent replacement quickly. Working with a strong staffing agency, like SmartTalent, allows you to bring in the right talent almost immediately.

Need help hiring?

Contact SmartTalent today to find out how we can help you keep your staffing situation on the right track.