Business: How to Prevent Top Talent from Leaving

Your productivity is directly linked to the quality of your workforce. Talented employees are hard to find, and harder to keep. Rival companies prowl the internet looking to poach the most qualified workers. However, there are steps you can take to keep your top talent onboard.

1. Understand Why They Are Leaving: It’s a shock when an employee you count on decides to move on. Whether they give formal notice or are a sudden no-show, you wonder why they’re leaving you.

Make time to reach out and discover exactly their reasons for the career change. Make exit interviews, by phone or in person, standard procedure. You may even be able to reach a new agreement that convinces your valued worker to stay on. When you hear common reasons like boredom, or dissatisfaction with salary or advancement, you worry over how many other employees feel the same way.

The best strategy for controlling these situations is to foster a climate of open communication with your team. Get to know them and take an interest in their problems and opinions. Even if this brings criticism of you or your business, you can’t let it offend you. Employee satisfaction should be high among your priorities, or you’ll face high turnover rates on a regular basis. Your company’s future may depend on making compromises.

2. Be Flexible: Employees may be experiencing an unhealthy work-life balance. Introducing flexible schedules is a popular solution among HR managers at this time.
More companies are offering employees varying work hours or work-from-home days. These measures can not only improve employee satisfaction, but lower your operating costs and draw a wider range of job candidates.
Allowing more flexible schedules could involve:

1. Full-time or part-time hours away from the office for those who can work remotely.

2. Flexibility in starting and quitting times.

3. A choice of work schedules, such as staggered or rotating shifts.

4. Set 10 hour or 12 hour shifts for a shorter work week.

5. Grant more sick days or unpaid time off for personal reasons.

6. The opportunity to accrue unlimited vacation hours.

7. Extended leave for those with children or family emergencies.

These ideas enable your employees to follow schedules that fit their lifestyles. They’ll have the chance to run errands or spend time with family and return to work with fewer distractions. Offering personalized schedules will be an asset in attracting and retaining top talent.

3. Prevent Employee Burnout: Most employees feel burnout at some point. It can happen to employees at any level or any industry due to stresses like tight deadlines, personal conflicts, long hours, or a breakneck pace. This kind of burnout impacts job performance, along with emotional stability and even physical health.

Don’t expect employees to set aside their personal relationships or life goals to benefit your bottom line. Even if your employees aren’t complaining, watch for signs of job fatigue. It may be due to conditions that you overlooked but providing proper training, better organization or leadership, and more realistic expectations might be the right remedy.

Be sure you’re providing support and gathering feedback when stress levels rise.

You can help prevent these situations by assigning responsibilities thoughtfully. Be sure the workers involved have the right level of training and experience. Give more responsibility to team members who feel passionate or show special talent. But don’t rely too heavily on even your best team. They might begin to feel exploited, and others under-appreciated.

You want a company culture where all employees feel challenged, not overwhelmed. But also allow everyone to take breaks or otherwise unwind while work is in progress. Support employees through additional training like seminars or a mentorship program to bring newer workers up to speed. Be certain your workers have quality tools available enabling them to execute their duties in an accurate and timely fashion.

The right tools to get things done correctly include technology for effective internal communications. Automation is also invaluable in making repetitive tasks faster, more efficient, and less error-prone. The advantage to employees is that it frees their minds of routine processes, help ig to lower stress while giving them time to develop skills on more important activities.

4. Reward Your Best Employees: Everyone likes to feel their efforts are appreciated. Failure to recognize an employee who makes a special contribution leaves them with a “why bother?” attitude.

Each missed opportunity to express gratitude or congratulations where it’s due can damage morale and lower job performance. A neglected employee will likely share their dissatisfaction with coworkers. His/her version of events might be posted on social media and go viral.
One of your responsibilities as a leader is to motivate your team. Poor motivation leads to an overall atmosphere of dissatisfaction.

Workers have different motivational needs. Some are working toward their next raise while others have long-term ambitions. But most will be pleased to earn small rewards such as a gift certificate or a day off.

When you know your employees as individuals, you’ll have a good idea of what motivates them. By providing the incentives to build job satisfaction, you’ll improve their trust and loyalty, and inspire them to new accomplishments.
To summarize, retaining the top talent means focusing on employee needs along with your expectations.

Open communication, incentives, proper tools and training, and simple appreciation will increase staff engagement. That creates a more satisfactory relationship for both sides.

Author Bio: Jasmine Williams covers the good and the bad of today’s business and marketing. When she’s not being all serious and busy, she’s usually hunched over a book or dancing in the kitchen, trying hard to maintain rhythm, and delivering some fine cooking (her family says so). Tweet her @JazzyWilliams88