With unemployment at historic lows, all companies are facing challenges attracting new employees.  However, once you hire them, how can you ensure that you retain your top performers.  After years of corporate layoffs, restructurings and benefit reductions, employee loyalty has waned as well.  Turnover is impossible to eliminate, but it can be controlled.  Here are some steps that you can take as an employer to impact the retention, especially for your best employees.

First you need to pay your people fairly.  If you are paying the market wage for jobs, it will be difficult for your workers to find a new job for a significantly higher salary.  This also means giving annual increases that keep their wages at market levels.  Too many companies start employees at a fair salary, but then provide minimal annual increases that cause them to dip below market rates.  There are many reasons that good employees leave; don’t make compensation one of them.

Second, you need to make the work interesting.  Good workers want to be challenged and learn new things and boredom is a sure way to lose them.  That means having a strategy for rotating workers, cross training and developing them for promotions and new responsibilities should be part of your human resources planning.

Flexibility is one of the top factors for millennials in evaluating a job.  However, they are not the only ones who values flexibility.  Working parents also need more flexible hours or the ability to work from home so they can balance their work responsibilities with their parenting responsibilities.  Also, with traffic in most areas getting worse and worse, letting workers skip that commute a day or two each week can make them happier and more productive employees.

Respect is also a key to retaining your top employees.  Valuing opinions and suggestions and providing a level of autonomy for workers to complete their assignments can provide a significant amount of job satisfaction and make employees feel appreciated.  On the other hand, when suggestions are ignored or demeaned it can have the opposite effect. 

This all sounds pretty easy, but most small business owners would have no idea how to implement these practices.  That is where Total Team Solutions can help.  As a full service human resource outsourcing firm based in Connecticut, we help small businesses in the tri-state area with hiring practices, performance management and developing policies that creates a dynamic workplace that supports employee retention.  For more information on how Total Team Solutions can help your company attract and retain productive employees, contact John Morlock at jmorlock@ttspro.com or 800-836-9678.