Employees are the backbone of any employer. Nurturing and helping your workforce grow and develop is crucial to avoiding high employee turnover and low retention rates. Losing top talent to your competitors can come at a significant cost to your organisation's bottom line, as well as employee morale.
In LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Goals 2023 report, it found that 93% of organisations were concerned about employee retention. The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic, Great Resignation and workplace restructuring have meant that organisations are continuing to grapple with retaining employees, as well as ongoing skills shortages. Offering continuous learning opportunities for your employees is key to helping them learn and grow in their roles within the organisation.
Take a look at these top tips for improving your employee retention.
Learn and understand more about your current employee retention and turnover
Employees will have their own reasons why they want to stay or leave. Before implementing any employee retention strategy, it's worth looking at your current employee retention and turnover rate. Having this insight can help you understand the areas for improvement concerning employee morale and satisfaction.
Measuring your employee turnover rate can help you understand where you stand compared to other organisations in your industry. It’s a good idea to calculate your annual employee turnover rate to get a good idea of the current number of employees you have at the start and end of the years, along with employees who have left.
Once you have a good understanding of your employee turnover rate, it can form as a solid foundation for putting together your employee retention strategy.
Create your employee retention strategy
Your employee retention strategy needs to consider your business goals, ensuring your top employees stay engaged and content. Employee retention strategies can include a lot of moving parts in terms of efficiency and financial impact.
Explore some of the key considerations to include in your employee retention strategy:
Ensure your purpose and goals are clear for your employees
As an employer, the constant changes that have occurred over the past couple of years have had a significant impact on your company’s growth and trajectory. Having a clear purpose, as well as goals that match up with your strategy is crucial to your organisation’s future success.
Gartner’s Future of Work Revisited highlighted the importance of organisations seeing employees as people. Within the report, the survey found that 82% of employees agreed their organisation needs to see them as a person, not just an employee. Taking the time to redefine your organisations purpose, vision, goals and values is crucial for understanding how you will make future decisions, innovations and changes.
Understanding what your employees want, while putting a plan in place to help them achieve their goals is key. Having milestones of short and long-term goals will ensure that as an employer you see the progression in how each employee within your company has developed over time.
Have a plan to avoid employee burnout
Having a plan in place to avoid employee burnout is important to making sure employee satisfaction and morale is high.
Encouraging employees to take breaks and allowing them to switch off outside of working hours can help ensure that they perform at their best. Mental and physical health are intertwined with one another, without it, employee productivity, creativity and efficiency will decline.
Conducting regular check-ins and allowing employees to air any concerns or feedback can be particularly beneficial. This is particularly important if you are a remote-only employer as it can be difficult to meet up with your workforce, due to employees working across different time zones. Starting those conversations with your employees will make sure they don’t feel burned out to the point that they decide to quit their job.
Offer flexible working options
Providing flexible working options, such as working remotely or having a 50-50 split between working from the office and at home is essential in reducing employee turnover and improving the employee retention rate within your organisation.
A joint survey conducted by TravelPerk and OnePoll found that 30% of UK companies are working fully on-site, which is just less than double at 57% pre-COVID-19 pandemic. Having a better work/life balance, increased productivity, improved employee morale, and loyalty and retention are just a couple of benefits that flexible working brings for both employees and employers.
Continuously upskill and reskill your employees
Providing opportunities for your employees to grow and develop their skills will ensure that they feel valued. Offering reskilling and upskilling programmes reduces the risk of any skills gaps emerging.
A joint report from Accountancy Age and Modulr found that the average staff attrition rate in the accounting sector increased from 14.69% in 2012 to 17.89% in 2022. Making sure that your employees have opportunities to continuously upskill and reskill can ensure that your workforce is consistently developing and growing to its full potential.
Looking to build the next generation of chartered accountancy professionals within your company? ICAEW qualifications are designed to support you to upskill and reskill your employees. Discover how offering ICAEW qualifications could benefit you and your employees.
Reduce employee turnover and improve employee retention with ICAEW
Investing in your employees is crucial to improving your employee retention rate as an employer, ensuring that your top talent is motivated and bringing their best selves to work. Listening and taking on-board employee feedback ensures that your organisation is receptive to improving the culture and working environment for everyone.
With guidance from a dedicated support team, access to tailored resources and a diverse range of training routes, you can retain top talent with ICAEW qualifications.