Many businesses struggle to hold on to their employees, which can be highly frustrating as for every employee who leaves a business a newbie has to take their place—meaning that valuable time is lost in training and settling a new employee into the job role they are employed to carry out.
It is far better from the business’s point of view, as well as the employee’s (if there are benefits attached to the job and the place of work, including the working atmosphere being desirable), that a long working relationship is formed. Here’s how you can support your employees and ensure that they are loyal to your business.
1. Provide training
Providing training for your employees will not only give them support within their working roles, but will also make them feel that they mean more to you as their boss than just a worker. This is not just about training them for their daily working tasks; you could also take this one step further and provide training for their future careers. Plus, there are other necessary employee training courses, like compliance training for new employees. You may worry that if your employees obtain additional qualifications at your expense then they will just leave the business upon completion, and for some, this could very well be the case. However, others will see this as an opportunity to better themselves within your business—especially if there is an opening that specifies their new credentials as being desirable.
2. Keep information flowing
However, training does not stop there. In most cases, there is a great deal of experience that is also required to become a total success in a job role. You can have your employees constantly asking one another for help and interrupting each other’s working day to a point of distraction; or you can invest in a business information platform that is easy to use and houses all of the information that your employees are likely to require. This will mean that they can work and learn at their own pace the majority of the time, and these are considerations that you as a boss are going to have to take into account.
3. Provide incentive schemes
In order to keep the attention of your workers on their job roles and entice them to better themselves and their own personal targets, you could put incentive schemes in place. Although you will want to challenge your employees you should make sure that the targets can actually be reached, as you will find that your employees will very quickly lose interest in ones that are unobtainable.
With this in mind, you should make sure that any prize or commendation is well worth the effort, and where possible offer a tiered level of targets so that those who are close are still rewarded, but not necessarily as much as those who meet the main target. It is also a must that you change the goal posts from time to time to ensure that you are not constantly awarding the same person (or set of people) over and over again.
4. Hold social events
Holding business social events can be a great way of providing support and inspiring loyalty amongst your workers, though it is important not to make them too formal. You are likely to find that employees are much more likely to attend if the event is causal; for example, a barbeque, a quiz night, or a softball game. This is because these events are more familiar and enjoyable than, say, a dinner dance or the seasonal company meal with a relatively set menu.
It is also recommended that these social events are very much seen as “attend if you want to” rather than compulsory affairs, as well as them being held at a location which is easily accessible to everyone within the workforce.
5. Have an open-door policy
This means that should any one of your employees feel that they need to talk to you, they can. In fact, this is an action that should be in place throughout your business. Many employees will feel happier if they can talk to a member of their choice, and although it may pain you to know that that person may not actually be you, it might be more beneficial in the long run if they feel more comfortable with someone else who can help them.
Any conversations that happen in this way should be kept strictly confidential within the hierarchy that is intended, and they should also be kept anonymous so that issues can be raised without the fear of victimization or retaliation.
Workers will appreciate the fact that they can go and speak to someone higher up the chain of command if issues arise, and that information is acted on without putting themselves, their social standing within the business, or their job on the line.
