#ThriveinFive: Revolutionising Your Retention Strategy

It's edition #18 of Thrive In Five. Our weekly newsletter designed to help your people and business thrive.

This week’s newsletter is all about keeping your very best employees.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the cost of replacing a member of staff can be 200% of their annual salary. ?

Money is only one reason why it's important to take care with your retention strategy. Keeping your best people also has a huge impact on your employee engagement, performance and happiness.

But for a talent retention strategy to succeed, it needs to be proactive, not reactive. So, what are the best ways to refresh your retention strategy?

Here are five suggestions:

#1 Monitor employee happiness.

Check how your employees are feeling right now. The Happiness Index , a Member of our partner network, have a great tool for this!

Use internal communications and feedback tools to understand and define the issues. Then you can use that feedback to better refine and even re-set your engagement measures and targets.

This knowledge will give you the strength to convince key stakeholders to buy into the changes you feel are vital to implement. After all, this might be part of a long-term process of improvement.

Once started, you need to assess the impact the changes are making and refine them if necessary. The ability to demonstrate positive change is essential if you are to keep the momentum and engagement from your C-suite into the activities you’ve implemented.?

#2 React quickly and take action.

Once you’ve identified an issue which needs to be addressed – don’t wait. You really do have a problem if it takes you months to fix it.

You need to show that you appreciate that there is a need to make a change and that you’re prepared to take action. Otherwise, you'll create a sense of resentment towards the business and its leadership. Why monitor anything or survey anyone, if you're not willing to take action?

#3 Offer flexibility.

We realise that work is a part of your life, not the other way around. Respecting employees’ time away from work is key to maintaining a healthy relationship with them.

Offering flexibility doesn’t only mean WFH schemes. There are many ways to offer flexibility. Take time to discover what works for you as a business.

It could be flexible scheduling or reduced workdays. Even simpler acts such as encouraging employees not to check email or answer work questions while away from work can go a long way.

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#4 Recognise and reward people’s successes.

Employees who feel appropriately recognised and rewarded by workplaces are much easier to retain long term. Studies also show those employees will work harder and be more productive.

This report found companies that prioritize recognising their employees multiple times per month are 41% more likely to see increased employee retention and 34% more likely to see increased employee engagement.

There are numerous ways to recognize and reward your employees, but it’s important to make sure you prioritise both social recognition and monetary rewards. It feels good to not only be recognised for our work, but to be publicly recognised.

#5 Promote wellness.

At Charlton Morris, our people strategy and benefits package is designed to support people's whole lives. Private healthcare with Vitality Health, access to professional mental health support through Zeno and Uplift Mental Health and free financial advice are all benefits we offer as standard to all employees.?

Think about how your policies, benefits and culture impact your people’s wellness.?

That's all for today! We hope you enjoyed the insight shared. Click to watch our recent webinar for more tips on: Cutting Recruitment Costs & Keeping Top Talent Using Data.

We'd love to get your feedback too - if you'd like to discuss any of the above points or have a suggestion for a future edition of #thriveinfive, just drop us an email through to [email protected].

For info about Charlton Morris, go to charltonmorris.com.