10 Effective Ways to Reduce Employee Turnover

Employee turnover reached new highs during the pandemic. People have been leaving their jobs in record numbers for over a year.

“The Great Resignation” began in April of 2022. Four million Americans quit their jobs in March 2022. By early August, 65% of US workers were actively job-hunting.

Attracting talent is costly. Losing that talent shortly after acquiring it is expensive. In such a tumultuous job market, its more important than ever for organizations to take effective action to reduce employee turnover.

These 10 approaches are proven methods to reduce employee turnover.

One – Make a good impression with an awesome onboarding process

The first six months is crucial. The new employee is getting their feet wet, learning the ropes of the job and making new friends. They are also deciding how long they are going to stick around for. If they are talented, your company is likely not their only option. You need to sell longevity to them while also getting them to do valuable work.

An awesome onboarding experience is streamlined. It makes the new hire feel welcome from the moment they step onto the premises and gets them into production right away. Do everything you can to make this as memorable as possible.

Take on the viewpoint of a new hire. Pretend to be one and walk through your onboarding process step by step and look for improvements. Look at everything from how the new hire is given a work space to where they park.

Survey your existing employees to find out what they liked most about the onboarding process and what they enjoy most about working in the company. You can use these results to highlight and improve the onboarding process.

Two – Avoid Micromanaging

Micromanaging is one of the top reasons why people leave their jobs. It’s awful. You start a new job. You are fired up to start work. The onboarding was great. And now, a manager stands behind you while you work. It doesn’t matter if this manager is kind, annoying or overbearing. The simple fact that they are hovering around your desk is nerve racking.

It’s also stressful for the manager. Micromanaging is a terrible management practice and should be totally rubbed out of any organization. This doesn’t mean that no supervision should occur at all...but there is a happy medium between effective managing and micromanaging.

Strive to strike the perfect balance. There is no “one size fits all” answer. Every employee and manager is different. Projects are different. Jobs are different. But one thing is uniform...micromanaging is counter-productive. Remember, the employee was hired for a reason and made it through the hiring process. Trusting him to do the job usually results in a job well done.

Three – Team Building and Mixers

Interpersonal relationships in the workplace are a huge factor in productivity. Working with your best friends sounds so much better than working with your co-workers form 9-5.

It’s totally unrealistic to expect all of your employees to become best friends, but you can still foster relationships and maybe these will blossom into something unexpected. When employees are connected on a personal level, they are significantly more likely to stay with a company and even turn away larger salaries to stick around.

You can encourage team building through fun activities such as group lunches and meetings designed to break the ice where co-workers share personal things about each other. You can also organize team building excursions like treasure hunts throughout your city. There are tons of services you can find online with pre-built treasure hunts in every city designed for corporate team building.

Four – Conduct Exit Interviews

No matter what you do, no matter how hard you work to keep talent...you are going to lose employees. Higher salaries, lifestyle changes, personal desires...you can’t possibly handle every reason an employee would want to leave a company. Some talented employees bounce around for no other reason than they want to.

One of your best defenses against heavy turnover is to thoroughly interview employees that are leaving. There really isn’t much to lose in this situation. The employee is already leaving. Find out why. The answers might surprise you. You can use this feedback to improve the work environment and company culture to prevent losses in the future.

Five – Mentoring

Offering employees mentorship makes them feel valued. Even if employees don’t ever take up the offer and enroll in a mentoring program, the simple fact that a mentoring program exists delivers the right message to all employees. The company cares.

Mentoring is also an awesome investment in your employees. They learn skills and improve by learning from the company’s best and brightest. This enhancement makes for a longer tenure while also boosting the value of the employee.

The best way to go about this is to use a formal mentoring program. Survey your staff to see what their career goals and aspirations are. Pair them up with mentors who can help make these a reality.

Six – Celebrate Employee Milestones

Anything your company can do to make employees feel recognized as individuals will reduce turnover. Employees who are acknowledged for work anniversaries, personal accomplishments or life changes such as getting married or having a child feel more of a connection to their respective organizations.

To do this well, you need a simple tracking system. You can upset someone if you miss acknowledging their birthday, but they see you publicly celebrate another employees birthday that same week. Keep an excel spreadsheet or setup some kind of alert system so no birthdays are missed and make it a point to celebrate other milestones as they come up.

Eight – Offer Competitive Pay

Money talks. Take home pay is usually at the top of the list when employees are deciding where to work. You can work to create the perfect work environment. Company culture could be vibrant. Employees could all be close personally, professionally and connected to the organization. But...if they can get double the pay working somewhere else chances are you are going to lose them. You don’t have to totally match your competitors employee compensation, but what you offer should be in the same ballpark.

Nine – Be aware of burnout and imbalances

Burnout, overload and work imbalances are easy to spot if you look for them. Too often, managers see indicators of burnout and don’t act. Employees being irritable, argumentative, fighting internally with each other and absenteeism are all signs of burnout.

It happens to the best of us. Just because and employee can work 7 days a week and 12 hours a day doesn’t mean that he should. He will burn out. Be aware of how much employees can shoulder and adjust workloads accordingly. If signs of burnout are ignored for too long it can result in turnover.

Don’t always leave it up to employees to tell you they are overloaded. They might be afraid of getting in trouble or losing their job if they tell a manager they have too much to do. If you see signs of employee burnout, address it on the spot before it festers into a worse situation.

Ten – Be willing to let go of employees

Not every employee is meant to retire working within your organization. The rate of turnover will never reach 0%. And that is a good thing.

Sometimes you have employees that aren’t a good fit. They made it through onboarding and HR thought they would be great. But they seem to fight and op-term with everyone in the place. Be willing to let this person go. It will be better for the company and better for them as they likely aren’t happy.

There is usually someone else out there who can do the job. Keep that in mind when talented employees leave your company.

Mentor Resources can help any company to leverage technology to create tailored career development programs that are cost-effective. Our mentoring software - Wisdom Share is a cloud-based program that is simple and comes with guided workflows. Included are tools for administrators to attract, enroll, connect, and guide participants. We also provide analytics to ensure you can monitor your employee development program and easily see ROI metrics.

Reach out to us today for a Free Demonstration of our software.