You have good employees, and you want to keep them. Instead of hoping for the best, use employee retention strategies that can have a measurable effect on your ability to retain the best people. What are the best employee retention strategies? It’s a question on many employers' minds, especially when we hear statistics about the large percentage of people looking for a new job: as high as 96%, according to one survey.
Retaining good employees is a substantial benefit to companies. It is a strategy that can save money, improve morale, increase the ratings of your workplace, and make employee retention easier. While it’s easy to say you want to retain employees, coming up with the best employee retention strategy is more of a challenge. The first step is to understand what makes employees happy. Here are four true/false questions to explore successful employee retention.
True or False?
An Engaged Employee = A Happy Employee?
Answer: False. Equating employee engagement with employee happiness can be easy, but these are different concepts. What matters most in employee retention is whether your employees are happy. Happiness leads to engagement: a happy employee is more likely to be engaged. However, this doesn’t mean you can measure employee happiness by looking at engagement.
Employee Pay Is Less Important Than Measures Of Employee Happiness?
Answer: True. As difficult as this may be to believe, multiple studies have shown that employees rank their happiness and company culture as more important than their pay and benefits. When looking for the best employee retention strategies, this isn’t to discount the importance of good pay and benefits. However, this is a warning that equating pay with happiness is an oversimplification that can lead to lower employee retention in the long run. Only by understanding what makes people engaged and happy can you hope to target those factors.
A Company Must Define Exactly What It Means To Be Happy Before They Can Really Understand Their Employees’ Satisfaction?
Answer: False. Happiness can mean something different for every employee. Instead of putting energy into creating universal definitions, which can be limiting, it’s more successful to accept that each employee will have a different sense of what makes them happy. At the end of the day, measuring your employee's happiness is much more important than defining it in an overly-rigid way.
The Best Retention Strategies Will Work At Any Company Universally, With Any Employees?
Answer: False. Before you decide on the best employee retention strategies, you’ve got to be able to measure where you’re starting. You cannot determine the best approach without measuring how your employees feel, what motivates them, and what exactly they’re happy with.
Measuring Happiness is Difficult?
Answer: True. Asking an employee, “Are you happy?” - or even “On a scale of 1 - 10, how happy are you?” - is not going to get you the data you need. If measuring employee happiness were that easy, more companies would be doing it. The truth is that a happy employee can be happy for many reasons, affected by many different factors of their job, including:
- Management
- Peers
- Work
- Purpose
- Communication
Amazing Workplace Is Here to Help
It can be daunting to figure out the best employee retention strategies. Schedule a demo today instead of tackling this critical question alone. You’ll learn how we can help your company retain the best employees.