It’s human nature – you don’t value something until it’s gone. The same applies to employees working at your store.
Imagine that on a fine Friday evening, you are planning to have a nice dinner with your family. Before leaving the store, an employee comes to you with a solemn face, handing out a piece of paper. It spells out “R-E-S-I-G-N-A-T-I-O-N” in bold. You have no idea what to say. It feels like you got taken out by a storm, but you compose yourself and accept the bitter truth.
This is when an epiphany strikes your mind that you never paid attention to the staff at your store. You always assumed that they were happy. This calls for a better response from your side, as you could also lose the remaining staff.
Losing a good-performing employee comes with costs. It means lost purchases & added inconvenience of hiring. The time that goes into hiring new employees impacts your operations – each one of them will be having a unique set of experiences, aspirations, and backgrounds. Finding out what makes a staff member happy and eager to come to work every day is a problem that must be addressed.
Keep reading to know how you can get your employees to stick for longer.
Why do employees quit?
In many industries, a single employee’s replacement might cost anywhere between one-half and twice their annual compensation. Hence, the obvious question arises: What is driving increased turnover rates, and why?
Lack of growth opportunities
Employees enjoy having alternatives, particularly when those possibilities provide greater salary, perks, and the ability to be challenged and pick up new skills.
91% of workers who have changed jobs claim to have done so in order to pursue career prospects.
The key to keeping employees is to set them up for success with a plan in a position they enjoy and can thrive in. The recruiting procedure, training, and goal-setting for each employee come first in this process.
Personal or Health Issues
Health problems, whether they be personal or familial, frequently cause employees to quit. Employees quitting your company due to unrelated health problems are mainly beyond your control as a business owner.
Think about providing better health insurance is a great strategy to address employee retention. Do you have any wellness projects for your staff? How can you make sure your full-time and part-time staff are safe while working?
For instance, if an employee has access to additional sick days to cover unanticipated medical situations, they won’t be required to quit. As a result, you save the long-term expenses associated with finding, interviewing, and onboarding a new employee.
Work-life balance problems
Employees frequently put their personal life above their work. They wouldn’t need to choose between the two in a perfect society. However, it appears that many companies have trouble striking the correct work-life balance.
Some people assert that it was due to their pursuit of a better work-life balance. According to the statistics, this trend isn’t slowing down as greater workplace flexibility is requested by all employees.
Boredom
The Work Institute also discovered that 10% of workers quit because they just don’t like their jobs. It might be tempting to maintain staff in the same position, but doing so frequently makes them want new tasks.
Employees frequently search for more fulfilling and interesting prospects because their employment is routine and often uninspiring.
Why Retain Employees
Businesses that make it a priority to keep their top performers benefit greatly. Every advantage you gain from higher staff retention has some sort of financial impact. Here are a handful of the top explanations for emphasising retention to help build a picture:
Spend less on employing staff
Lowering your turnover rate is the most effective strategy to cut hiring expenditures. Companies may avoid spending an average of 33% of an employee’s compensation on recruiting, vetting, and onboarding new hires by having a high employee retention rate.
Higher efficiency
More contented workers typically produce more. In fact, research by Oxford University found that they can be up to 13% more productive. Businesses must invest in their personnel from the moment new hires begin the onboarding process and beyond if they want their workers to be more productive.
Better customer experiences
Satisfied workers translate into happier customers. It is simple to understand how it will develop in practice. For instance, happy employees in charge of checking clients out, responding to inquiries, stacking wholesale products on time and taking phone calls won’t frighten away consumers with negative attitudes and terrible treatment if you’re running a retail store.
Tactics for keeping employees
Finding personnel with lasting power is one thing. It’s another to be able to maintain them over time. Here are a few ideas to think about.
Dependable onboarding, training, and recruiting procedures
Your hiring process is a good place to start if you want to increase staff retention rates.
This is where you may clarify your messaging and the information you want potential employees to know. According to a poll, up to 31% of new hires quit their jobs after only six months since the work wasn’t what they had anticipated.
Don’t overlook the onboarding procedure. Also, don’t overwhelm them with a long list of tasks on the first day itself.
Competitive Salaries & Benefits
For every employee, feeling valued and recognised for their efforts is beneficial. However, hygiene, or the requirement for fair remuneration, is a crucial element of employee happiness, as stated by Herzberg’s two-factor theory.
54% of workers would quit their jobs for a wage boost and 20% would leave for better benefits.
Everyone enjoys being acknowledged for their outstanding efforts. Employers may take advantage of the demand for recognition to make sure their staff members feel valued and appreciative. Up to 83% of workers say that being acknowledged at work makes them happy.
Ask what made them quit
Exit interviews can be conducted as part of your join, stay, and leave model. Take the opportunity to speak with workers privately and ask them to complete an exit survey as they submit their notice and fulfil their notice period.
You should raise all the queries at this point in order to gain maximum understanding. such inquiries as:
What made you look for a new job?
How pleased were you with the workplace atmosphere?
What would you like to change in the workplace?
Did we give you the knowledge and resources you needed to execute your job well?
What aspects of your job would you change?
How might we have improved your stay with us?
You’ll have more useful information to work with when you onboard and offboard workers if your questions are as precise and straightforward as possible. Don’t attempt to pry too much, instead, show genuine concern.
Be welcome for criticism
Companies that act on customer feedback have better engagement rates than those that don’t. Feedback is a two-way road. What does this indicate for your retention strategy for employees?
Make your staff members feel heard. An anonymous tip box and frequent staff reviews can possibly help. You must set aside time to discuss each employee’s performance and areas for improvement.
Employee retention depends on listening to your staff and respecting them as unique persons, and not simply as employees. Observe what works well for them and what doesn’t.
Provide options for flexible work
The more freedom you can provide your staff, the better. Flexible work arrangements are associated with higher retention rates, according to surveys. Employees won’t feel pressured to choose a better workplace that supports work-life balance as a result.
It’s important for company owners to take the time to learn which positions might provide different levels of flexibility. One of the greatest methods to assure more work-life balance is to do this.
Summing Up
If you are a retailer selling wholesale products is to get curious about what drives your staff members, what they require, and how to foster an environment of employee engagement that meets those needs so they can perform at their best.
Your company will have a higher chance of long-term growth and talent attraction with a clearly defined staff retention strategy.
