How to Retain Your (Best) Employees?

When the whole world is talking about how to recruit new employees (during this pandemic), we’re raising our toast to do the opposite.
Research says that recruitment cost is way higher than retaining your best employees that do not flinch even when they need to go the extra mile.
So, how would you retain your best employees?
In this article, we will articulate specific ways to retain your (best) employees.
We will start with the low-hanging fruits and then talk about the ones that will give you thriving benefits.
Care, truly care for your employees
Don’t worry about judging whether you’re taking care of your best employees.
It doesn’t matter who’s best and who isn’t.
What matters is who you nourish, nurture, and provide resources to, for growth.
If you apply the ‘employees first, customers second’ approach, you don’t need to worry about sales.
And as an HR, it’s your prime obligation to treat your employees as a human being and not as a machine.
Instead of looking at an employee’s result, look at her efforts and the reason behind her poor performance.
When you care, truly care for your employees, they’ll give you back, in much larger chunks than you could ever imagine.
And they’ll stay and make a ruckus.
Ensure continuous growth of your employees
Stagnancy feels good, growth drives results.
When you’d provide them with deadlines after deadlines and only focus on the urgent stuff, your employees can’t grow at your organization.
Give them meaning instead.
Allow them to do stuff they love to grow at.
There’s no wonder that Google allows their employees 20% of their work time to work on their passion project.
You may not need to be as drastic as Google. But you get the idea.
Give them wings and they will fly and build a bigger nest for you.
[You may consider one of our HR certifications for your employees. When you invest in your assets, they grow at an exponential rate. Your employees are your assets.]
Make inclusion is your best HR strategy
Inclusion should start at the heart of your organizational HR strategy.
Judging an employee based on color, race, religion, gender, age will only affect you in the end.
Rather create an inclusive culture where everyone could be themselves.
As an HR, it’s your job to ensure the maximization of the value of the stakeholders. Your employees are your biggest stakeholders since they’re spent one-third of their lives to help you grow.
And compensation isn’t enough.
Create a culture where they can breathe, take initiative, and make bold moves.
If it’s a win-win for your employees and you, your organization will thrive in the end.
Pay them so well that they don’t need to think about money
Yes, often the money is tight. And you don’t know whether this is worth your investment.
Well, we understand.
Here’s what you should do –
- Step:1 – Hire less, only hire those who’d be culturally fit and have the right attitude and character
- Step:2 – Train your existing employees to do an additional job instead of hiring a new employee instead
The above two are applicable only when you have a budget constraint.
If not, you should hire specialists and also generalists.
An organization needs both. At the intersection of generic tasks and specific actions, every organization thrives.
Consider HR as the most important thread of your business
While many small and medium businesses look at HR roles as redundant, this is a grave mistake.
A great HR strategy may make or break an organization in the long run.
The idea that anyone can perform the tasks specifically designed for HR is not only delusional but also has long-lasting side effects.
Not having an HR or a team of HR will be like having the body without blood.
The organization would seem to function pretty well, but at the end of the day, it won’t be able to treat employees as an organization should treat human beings.
Human resources are not about resources, it’s about humans.
When humans beings are resourceful, we call it HR.
And without having an HR strategy aligned with your overall organizational strategy, you won’t be able to retain your employees, forget the best ones.
In the final analysis
An organization thrives in proportion to the human beings they nurture.
If you’re thinking that we’re talking about your customers, you’re wrong.
We’re talking about who you hire. If you nurture them, they will nurture your customers.
And if you don’t. You know the consequences, don’t you?