After going through all the efforts of hiring the right employees for your business, the next step is to keep them. High employee turnover rates is a very costly affair for companies and apart from being expensive due to having to start a new recruitment process, it also has a negative impact on time and productivity. Therefore, reviewing your employee retention strategy is of significant importance to your business´ success. However, there´s not always budget for a raise and to be fair, high employee retention is definitely not only based on salary. There is so much more to a successful employee retention strategy and many of the aspects have to do with the culture, work atmosphere and how an employee can manage their life.
So how can you reduce your employee turnover without raising salaries? Below 4 tips that will improve your employee retention that don´t involve a raise.
- Flexibility of location
One of the biggest annoyances of many employees it the daily time lost in commuting. The time to travel to and from the office is time they can´t spend at home with their families, doing sports or meeting with friends. And time is a scarce resource. By offering your employees flexibility in working location and by setting up rules on remote working, you are effectively giving them some time back. If a couple of days a week your employees are allowed to work from home, they save so much time and that is time they can dedicate to other important parts of their life. It is not surprising that nowadays flexibility is valued oftentimes higher by employees when evaluating potential employers than very high salaries.
- Flexibility of hours
Flexibility has not only to do with location but also with hours. Having a job where your hours are very fixed will obviously have an impact on other parts of your life. Whereas if you have the flexibility to make your own schedule (of course within reason and around planned meetings) you might give your employees the opportunity to pick up their kids from school once in a while or squeeze in a gym visit during an extended lunch break. If they make up the time at another point and you know they finish their work, why care too much about when it actually gets done? By offering the flexibility of hours you give your employees more power over their life and the opportunity to be more active in other important aspects of their life as well.
- Training opportunities
Many employees don´t work just for the money their job brings in, of course, that is an important part of it but many employees also want to develop themselves and grow as a professional. By providing training opportunities you are answering to that personal and professional development desire. Training is less expensive than giving a raise and it will of course also have a positive impact on the quality of work of your employee and their working style.
- Creative perks
There are a lot of creative perks that you can think of that will have a positive impact on employee retention. Think about simple things that don´t seem significant to you but that help employees to better manage their lives and therefore have a big impact to them. Perks like free lunch, dry-cleaning pick-up, a shower at the office so you can work-out during lunch break, or free health consultations can make a big difference for employees. Apart from these general perks, you could also think about personalized perks. For example, if you know that one of your well-performing employees is a big baseball fan, why not give them VIP seats for the next game? It´s these small gestures that can make a big difference in employee retention.
What other ways can you think of that boost your employee retention but don´t involve a raise?
