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Hot Management Tips ...
How To Reduce Staff Turnover ...
Here are seven ways to reduce staff turnover:
- Try to encourage employees to be friends with each other. If your business is a place of friendship, employees are less likely to leave because they miss their friends.
- Structure as much of wages as possible as fringe benefits. The more benefit, the more the disruption to employees who leave. And because they don’t like disruption, it tends to stop them leaving. For example, if key employees have a company car, it makes the decision to leave harder because they must also find another car.
- Make employees feel that their ideas are appreciated. If they want to do something their way, it may pay to let them - even if it is not quite as good as the way you would do it. By letting them do it, they feel happier in their job and less likely to leave.
- Encourage staff to attend training programs to develop their abilities for their work. If they do, it increases their interest in the job they are doing - so they are less likely to want to leave. I tell my staff that I want them to improve their abilities every way the can - so they will have better job opportunities if they leave. And I mean it.
- If you can do so, consider allowing employees flexible working hours. Flextime reduces staff turnover because employees can tailor their job to better suit their personal needs.
- Try to make employees feel you are interested in them personally. Create situations where almost spontaneous discussions about their families or hobbies occur. This goes a long way towards creating a sense of personal loyalty which helps hold a person in the job.
- Keep an eye on the wage levels in your industry. If you are paying below the standard, it is easier for your staff to be tempted to leave. Salary is not the main thing that keeps an employee from leaving, but if the levels aren’t right, it does become important.
If it costs a month’s salary to find and retrain a new employee (and it can cost a lot more) and if your staff turnover is 25%pa (and it can be a lot higher), staff turnover will cost 25% of your wages bill. So it’s worth doing what you can to reduce it. You can never measure how much, lower staff turnover can save you. But it can make a dramatic difference to your balance sheet.
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