According to a new survey that Gartner has published, nine out of every ten (90%) HR leaders report that employee turnover is a significant concern they’re facing. With figures like that, it’s not surprising that employee retention is always a primary focus for HR teams and business leaders.
Here are three critical facts about employee turnover in the United Kingdom in 2021:
– 46% of UK workers say their companies training opportunities make them more inclined to stay in their current job.
– 87% of Millennials, those born between 1996 and 2005, say that accessing professional development opportunities is crucial when deciding to stay in their role.
– 63% of polled Chief Financial Officers report an increase in employee turnover within their company since 2019.
With that in mind, in this blog post, we’re going to explore 8 tips on how you can use your HR platform to reduce employee turnover within your company.
How do you calculate an employee turnover rate?
To calculate your company’s employee turnover rate, you need to follow this formula: We divide the number of terminates during a specific period by the number of employees at the beginning of that period.
Let’s say your company started 2021 with 300 employees, and during the year, 14 people left the business, 14/300 = 0.05, or 5%.
But what’s a reasonable employee turnover rate? This varies depending on your industry, and there’s no correct answer. However, statistically speaking, the average turnover rate is around 18%. So, in our example, our company would be well below the average for employee turnover.
What steps can you take to reduce your employee turnover rate?
With all that in mind, what can you do to keep high performers and contributors with your business? Small changes in career development opportunities, work-life balance, manager relationships, compensation and overall wellbeing, are all elements that can make employee turnover preventable.
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Make sure that you’re hiring the right people for your company:
The best way to ensure employees don’t leave you is to make sure you are hiring the right employees to begin with. Simple steps include using your integrated recruitment module to define the role clearly, ensure you get the correct answers at the interview stage, and use third-party application integration to make sure you reach as many potential candidates as possible.
But that’s not a guaranteed solution. Even when you follow the advice, sometimes you get an employee who just doesn’t fit. In that case, the best thing you can do is use your performance management module to engage the worker and improve their performance through custom performance improvement plans or regular one-to-one meetings with their line manager.
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Embrace the new way of working and introduce flexibility to your staff:
In the post-COVID world, and with new government policies being introduced, your team will now expect a flexible life/work balance to be a standard ‘perk’ of any position. This year, a Boston College Centre for Work & Family study found that 76% of managers and 80% of employees indicated that flexible work arrangements positively affected retention.
What does this mean for you? If your company is not offering employees flexibility around work hours and locations, they might quickly leave you for someone who will offer them the ability to work from home or work around their family needs.
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Ensure your salaries and benefits are up to date:
Simply put, are you paying your employees the fair going wage for their work, and are you offering them competitive benefits that they want? If you’re not, then who can blame them for ditching your company?
To solve this, you could use Glassdoor to final the national average salary for a specific role or an internal company survey to discover what benefits your staff want. Likewise, you need to make sure that your salaries are constantly updated to reflect the world we live in or the jobs you could lose your staff to. Consider a yearly review, which in the case of 2021, would look to see if you could increase their salary by 1.25% to cover the rise in National Insurance or 0.85% to cover the 2020 increase in UK Inflation.
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Don’t forget to recognise the accomplishments of your team:
If employees aren’t being recognised for their hard work, they will become discouraged and disengaged, and over time, that could lead them to want to leave your organisation to pursue new goals and challenges. Recognising employees’ accomplishments is essential to the skill development of your staff and ultimately preventing employee turnover.
By making it a priority to recognise the efforts of each employee through HR platform modules like a social feed, managers will help create a culture where hard work is acknowledged and respected.
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Make sure you have a developed training and development plan:
Providing your employees with training and development opportunities will display the commitment given by your company. Likewise, your line managers can implement training and development plans to help employees reach agreed-upon career goals that will improve their current job performance.
Then, by using your HR platform and its integrated training and development module, you will be able to track the project’s progress and gauge the employee’s key strengths and weaknesses based on how they perform the tasks.
This approach will motivate your employees to learn new skills that could help you reduce any skill gaps within your business. When the workforce feels that their personal goals and objectives are being taken care of, they will stay longer with your company.
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Don’t shy away from offering regular feedback to your staff:
Sharing feedback with employees regularly enables them to see themselves from the employer’s perspective and allows employees to develop a long-term commitment to the company through investment in its people. When your staff know that their line managers promote individual development, it will boost their motivation levels and eventually increase retention.
Employee feedback in the form of feedback and one-to-one meetings is instrumental in making them feel valued. As a manager, you can work with your employees on their performance and provide them with more opportunities to develop their skills in the workplace.
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Always invest in monitoring and developing your workplace culture:
Your employees’ day-to-day duties are not the be-all and end-all when it comes to enjoying their role. Your company’s culture plays a central role in how much employees enjoy their job and is essential in retaining employees.
However, you can’t change or strengthen a culture without first identifying what type of culture the company has. The most important thing is being honest about and communicating openly about the organisation’s culture as it is — not as it aspires to be — with new hires and current employees.
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Use your HR data to see what issues are present within your company:
Your HR software can break down turnover numbers through the ability to create reports that use your employee data to present you with valuable information. The ability to collect, analyse and act on turnover-related data in real-time and compare it to historical trends will be essential to finding, developing and retaining your best employees.
Using your employee data can report on statistics from termination root causes, top performer turnover trends, and turnover demographics. These can positively influence an organisation’s talent management strategy.
Using Natural HR’s platform to support your retainment rate within your business
Natural HR offers a range of free online resources to support you and your company as you look to improve your retainment rate, including blogs on how to use your people data to improve employee retention.
Find out more in our free guide about the challenges faced by HR leaders.
To discover more about how Natural HR’s software can help your company and reduce turnover, book a demo today.
