How to retain your best employees | 5 strategies you can use to reduce turnover

Do you feel like your best and brightest have one eye on the door? Is constantly rehiring and retraining the same positions starting to test your patience? We’ve got 5 proven strategies you can start using today to improve employee retention.

A business’s ability to grow and innovate is in a major way governed by its ability to retain and develop its best people. Talented, long term employees are where innovation comes from, how a culture of success is fostered, and how it retains and develops its identity.

But how do you retain employees? Competing for talent gets harder and harder for businesses as more jobs become remote, and the most talented and sought after individuals are suddenly kids in a near global candy store (or at least an Anglophone-speaking candy store), so how do you keep people sweet in your organisation?

1. Cultivate a positive corporate culture and focus on every employee’s quality of working life

Creating a positive corporate culture is essential for retaining your best employees. You need to ensure you have a working environment that promotes open communication, collaboration, and recognises the achievements of employees.

Think about encouraging teamwork and providing opportunities for employees to contribute their ideas and opinions. A positive corporate culture is one where every employee wins, not a place with winners and losers. An element of this will likely involve setting time aside for team building activities.

Creating a positive corporate culture is cultivating an environment in which employees can feel connected to the organisation, its ethics, and its mission, and when that’s achieved, retention is easy.

Pro tip: A positive corporate culture is heavily linked to quality of working life, or QWL. This is defined as the quality of an employee’s working conditions, and general wellbeing in their day-to-day duties.

Gamification – the application of game mechanics to everyday tasks – can be a great way to facilitate communication between staff to improve everyone’s QWL at a job. For example, someone who’s a minority, or has a disability, could have a very different QWL to their colleagues, even if they have the same job title or similar duties.

By creating gamified content, you can create scenarios and ask questions that help illustrate users’ blindspots regarding all sorts of social issues which might make some colleagues feel uncomfortable. You can also include intermediate screens with educational videos and text.

2. Improve and promote a healthy work life balance

Most people are quite upfront about living to work and not working to live these days, so recognising and promoting a healthy work-life balance is crucial for reducing turnover and retaining top talent. You can do this by encouraging employees to prioritise their well-being, by implementing policies that support flexible working hours, as well as offering remote work options to accommodate people’s family responsibilities and personal lives.

Another aspect of avoiding churn and burn with your employees plays into culture: namely making sure yours is one that respects personal boundaries and discourages overworking. It’s also important to allocate resources and support for managing stress and promoting wellness, which, depending on your setup, could take the form of fitness programmes or counselling services, among numerous other possibilities.

Pro tip: This is another retention strategy that can benefit enormously from gamified communications.

Using Drimify’s Dynamic Path™, you can use multiple games and Quizzes to build a multi-level course that tackles all aspects of creating a healthy work-life balance.

For one thing, chronic overworking can often stem from an employee’s idea of what’s expected of them, as opposed to what’s actually expected of them, so coaching them on things like the 4 Ds (do, delegate, delay, drop), and prioritisation to know when it’s appropriate to go the extra mile, especially when it comes from their actual employer, can be enormously beneficial for retaining that employee, both because they won’t burn themselves out, and just as a gesture, it fosters goodwill.

You could also include levels, courses, or modules on general time management and healthy habits, so you not only facilitate a healthy work-life balance, but help your teams maximise on that work life balance. A good example is asking users to imagine the different aspects of their life in the form of buckets, or glasses, and assess how “full” each container is. This sort of exercise is great for encouraging people to think, be present, and actively lead the lives they want to lead. It shows your employees that you view them as main characters as opposed to NPCs.

3. Gamify employee satisfaction for better results

If you need people to engage in something, learn something, or complete an action to the best of their ability, gamifying it is nearly always the most innovative and effective approach to take.

You can use the Drimify platform to create Surveys to assess employee satisfaction levels and give you quantitative and qualitative feedback, build courses that can help you deliver time and cost efficient professional development training, and create experiences similar to those mentioned in the first 2 strategies.

4. Conduct “stay interviews”

“Stay” interviews involve having regular conversations with your employees to understand their needs, aspirations, and concerns. Instead of waiting until employees decide to leave and conducting an exit interview to find out why, proactively engage in discussions about their job satisfaction, career goals, and any potential areas for improvement within the organisation.

You can use this feedback to identify and address issues, provide necessary support, and make appropriate changes to retain your top performers. By conducting stay interviews, you demonstrate your commitment to employee development, contribute to a culture of open dialogue, and show your employees they’re valued.

5. Offer opportunities for learning and advancement

Providing opportunities for learning and advancement is a powerful way to retain your best employees. Ways to do this include offering professional development programmes, training sessions, and workshops that allow employees to enhance their skills and knowledge.

Implementing a clear career progression framework that provides achievable goals and opportunities for growth within the organisation means ambitious employees are more likely to stay. If they can see their path to advancement within what you offer, they’re less likely to look for it elsewhere.

Key takeaway

By implementing some or all of these strategies, you can significantly improve employee retention and reduce turnover within your organisation. Cultivating a positive corporate culture, promoting work-life balance, conducting stay interviews, and offering learning and advancement opportunities are all crucial elements for creating an environment where employees feel valued, motivated, and engaged in their careers.

It’s important to remember that each employee is unique, so it’s essential to tailor these strategies to individual needs and preferences. By focusing on retaining your best employees, you’ll not only save on recruitment and training costs, but also build a stronger and more successful business as your people grow within it.