Employee Retention: How to keep your best talent all year round

In 2019, January 31 was the most popular day to quit your job. In 2022, it was January 21. With all the layoffs in the tech industry, who knows if that end-of-January voluntary rush would continue in 2023? If your employees were going to jump ship, they would be gone by now. So you can relax because we’ve made it to February!
Ha ha ha, sorry, no.

If only employee retention were so easy. Here’s what you need to be doing all 12 months of the year to retain your employees. (And after all, since Gallup estimates that it costs anywhere from 50 percent of annual salary to 200 percent to replace people, this is the fiscally responsible thing to do.)

Even with the scary month of January ending, people are still looking for new jobs. You don’t have to sit back, though. Here’s what you can do to increase employee retention.

Employees tend to be much more vocal about what they want and are much pickier than in the past. You’re unlikely to change that behavior, so embrace it. Flow of Work finds that 50-80 percent of employees are looking to move into more challenging roles–either immediately or in the near future.

If people don’t see a path up, they will start to look for a path out. Once you understand this principle, you’re on the path to employee retention. Think about the things that your business should be doing.

Helping employees set career goals. You make goals for your employees' current jobs each year as part of your performance appraisal process, but you need to do more. You need to talk about career paths for them as well.

Small businesses often struggle with this as there isn’t a defined path like there can be in a large multinational. But there are things you can do to help determine career pathways for your employees. Think about increased responsibilities, cross-training, and growing the business in general.

Train your managers. So many companies assume managers know how to manage. In reality, managing is a very different skill set from being an individual contributor. Make sure your managers have training on how to manage–including how to have meaningful career conversations.

Sometimes employees are hesitant to bring up skill gaps they may have or career plans with their boss for fear of a punitive response. Ensure your managers know how to have these conversations and that employees feel comfortable having them.

Make internal movement safe. Do you require an employee’s current manager to approve a move to a new position? Or worse, do you need an employee’s current manager to approve before an employee can apply for an internal job? Stop these things.

Of course, you want continuity and don’t want managers to be left without employees as people transfer. However, if you make it challenging to move internally, people will just look outside your company. In that case, you’ll be lucky to get two weeks’ notice, and the current manager gets absolutely no say in the matter.

You don’t want managers to hold back valuable employees. You want people to move onward and upward. It keeps the employees engaged and happy, and they, in turn, will help make your business profitable.

Provide coaching to your employees. Do you ever feel like you’re winging your own career while everyone else seems to know what they are doing? Well, everyone (almost everyone) feels like they are winging it. They don’t have to. You can implement career coaching to help your employees succeed. And remember, it’s not just the high-potential employees that need help. The only reason Jane or John isn’t on your high-potential list may be that they need some coaching.

Just like talking about money is taboo, people tend not to speak with their bosses about what they want in a career. They simply look elsewhere if the current company can’t provide it. But what if you removed the taboos around this?

What if you not only talked about it, you spoke of people’s skills and could access the information about skills and aspirations? If you needed to fill a position and this position needed someone who could speak Thai, wouldn’t it be great to look and see if one of your current employees could speak Thai?

Substitute that for any skill.

If you have a list of available skills, you also have a list of skills you need to add. Then you can either use internal training, education reimbursement or focus your hiring to make sure you have the current skills you need for today and a skills-based pipeline for tomorrow.

This, of course, requires time and digital solutions to pull the data together. This form of people analytics can make a real difference in your business.

Having managers work with employees and combine that with the proper tools, you’ll see a great benefit to your company. 

Flow of Work Co is a talent insights and opportunity marketplace that connects the skills and aspirations of your employees to internal opportunities like learning, projects, and roles to help them learn, grow and stay with your company.

Find out more and book a demo.