Turnover rate is a number every employer is aware of because it directly impacts their bottom line. Whether it’s the cost of offboarding an exiting employee, onboarding their replacement, the knowledge drain, or the cost of training a new hire, it all equals a potentially preventable expense. Turnover costs are commonly cited as about 150% of the base salary of the replaced employee, but according to SHRM, it can actually be up to 300%. So what can you do? Here are some ideas that can help you reduce the turnover in your workforce, so you can keep this money in your business:
Attract and motivate top management talent
Have you ever heard the expression, “People don’t leave companies, they leave managers”? Good managers motivate their employees to be more productive, and motivated employees are happy employees – and happy employees tend to stay. If you have a turnover problem, don’t forget to evaluate your leaders as well.
Offer rewards
This doesn’t always have to mean pay raises and bonuses (although you’ll be hard-pressed to find an employee who’d turn one down!) Employees want to feel appreciated, so foster an environment of acknowledgement. Praise employees for specific actions, and do it publicly. Make your workplace an environment where employees feel noticed, and know their contributions are recognized.
Make it interesting
While it’s not always possible, remember that variety is the spice of life. Keep employees engaged by offering advancement opportunities and cross-training. Boredom is a productivity killer, and a surefire way to send your employees looking for other job openings.
Keep your ear to the ground
Most employees don’t wake up one day and decide to quit. If you are engaged with your employees, you can spot potential problems before they cost you money. Are your employees feeling overworked? It might be more cost-effective to hire an additional person or bring in temporary staff than to wait until an employee reaches a breaking point and leaves – taking all their training and knowledge with them. Do you have a trouble-maker on your hands? It’s best to learn about it early and take steps to mitigate their behavior than find out too late that they’ve damaged your employees’ morale – at a certain point, firing the trouble-maker will cost you more than just replacing them, as you struggle to bring productivity back up to its previous levels among your remaining staff.
Hire the best
Most experts will tell you that the single best thing you can do to reduce or prevent turnover is to hire the best person in the first place. Making that decision can be overwhelming, and there can be a sense of flying blind. Drug tests and background checks can offer some information, but can be costly, so they are best saved for those who have made it through your pre-hire processes. Your hands are tied in some legal areas – questions you’d like to ask, but can’t; information you need, but don’t have access to. One way to have access to some of this is through integrity testing. Insight’s screening tools can help you identify people who do drugs, steal, and would commit worker’s compensation fraud, among other behaviors. Some assessments even reveal information about a potential employee’s work ethic, conflict avoidance skills, and likelihood to turn over quickly. In short, Insight can give you that missing piece of information to help you keep high risk employees out of your workforce from the start.
Investing in your business is the key to growth, and Insight is committed to helping you identify the best people to help you along that path.
