5 Tips to Reduce Employee Turnover

If you want to be a successful business you need to hit your goals. To hit your goals you need more than the right talent, you need that talent to perform and to keep on performing; to stay committed. You can’t hit your goals without a committed team.

This is why it’s important to ensure you make not only the right hire, but that you create a culture that will make them want to stay.

With a job market full of candidates (congrats, college graduates – sorta!) – why should you care about reducing turnover when you can just replace headcount?

1. On average, it costs you their salary x 150% to replace each person. (250% if you’re an executive).

2. You lose in-house knowledge that is not easily or cheaply replaced.

3. You’ve lost momentum towards reaching your goals.

Hiring someone who is a skills and culture fit to join your team is only half the battle. To get talent to stay – reduce turnover – you need to make sure your culture supports engaging and retaining your talent.

So how can you increase employee retention and reduce turnover?

1. Communication – Create a culture of transparent and open communication. Maintaining open lines of communication between leadership and employees goes a long way to increasing employee commitment. Employees need opportunities to feel heard. Allowing for interdepartmental communication, reducing silos, also makes employees feel less isolated. Open communication also helps employees see how their work contributes to the bigger picture.

2. Recognition – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – recognize, recognize, recognize! People have a fundamental human need to feel valued, heard and appreciated – particularly when they feel they’ve done a great job. If you’re not sure how to recognize for a job well done – ask your people. Without an understanding of your people, behaviors, and what engagement and rewards strategies work for best for your culture, reducing turnover can be even more difficult.

3. Processes – Your people are just as likely as your customers to get pissed off by poor or redundant processes. If you want to reduce turnover, develop transparent and easy to follow processes – and train your people on how to execute them. You want to design processes that help bolster a high performance culture not inhibit one.

4. Leadership – According to one study 80% of employee turnover resulted from the environment created by a manager as opposed to the company at large. So it’s critical to work closely to make sure there’s a consistent open line of communication between employees and managers, and that managers are working collaboratively and positively with their employees to reduce turnover. Trusted relationships are key. Leadership should be authentic, approachable, honest, and supportive .

5. Training – For employees to remain engaged and committed, they need to feel they have the skills to do their job. To help determine what type of training may be needed, think about what types of knowledge and learning opportunities can help them better perform their jobs? Most employees don’t want to perform poorly, they often just haven’t been provided with the training needed. Ask what types of knowledge and learning opportunities make them feel challenged as individuals? Collect the data and act on it. Offer options based on employee input. One of the quickest ways to reduce turnover and increase performance is to increase engagement.

At the end of the day – you’re only as successful as your people. Do what you can to reduce employee turnover and keep the good talent. Not only will your budget thank you, but so will your employees and customers.

About Scott Span, MSOD, CSM: is CEO & People Strategist, Communications and Change, at Tolero Solutions. He supports clients to engage and retain talent and wow customers, achieving success through people, creating organizations where people enjoy working and customers enjoy doing business.