Two things key to staff retention | Tips & Tricks

Employees make the business. Your success hinges on having engaged, well-trained workers who play an active role in moving your company forward. When you find a good person, you want to keep that employee around.

Staff retention is a complex issue. While pay is an important component, there’s a lot more that goes into employee happiness. A competitive paycheck is a good start, but a new survey of British businesses conducted by our sponsor Indeed.com and the British Chambers of Commerce shows companies are thinking hard about using training and flexible working practices to keep valuable employees on board.

While the survey involved 1,000 businesspeople from across the pond, the ideas are universal. Both training and flexible working options can be a huge boost to staff morale. Let’s take a deeper look at what this means.

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Training

Training is about investing in the development of your employees. It goes beyond just preparing them for their current roles. It’s also about making sure they’re ready for new developments in your business. It’s about giving them the skills to move forward and step into new roles. Investing in training can help you fill needs from within while letting employees know you value their growth.

If you think this sounds like a smart idea, you’re not alone. The Indeed.com survey found just under half of businesses would invest in training and developing their employees as a way to increase staff retention.

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Flexible working practices

The traditional work week isn’t dead, but many companies are finding ways to improve the work-life balance for their employees. The concept of flexible working practices covers a lot of ground. This can include remote working opportunities, flexible hours, or job sharing. Nearly 40 percent of the businesses in the Indeed.com survey say they would look at introducing flexible work arrangements in order to keep staff.

Increasingly, jobseekers and employees are looking beyond the paycheck and placing a premium on flexibility. They want to spend time with their families, take sick leave when needed, and work from home when it makes sense. The payoff is happier employees who feel motivated and committed and who place an emphasis on productivity over simply logging hours at a desk.

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“Increasingly, employers are embracing flexible working practices as a sensible way to retain staff who need to balance work with family and other commitments,” said Jane Gratton of the British Chambers of Commerce. “Amid rising upfront costs for businesses, it is crucial that innovative ways are found to motivate staff.”

While work-from-home opportunities are a popular arrangement, flexible working practices can also include simple schedule shifts that help workers be there to pick their kids up from school in the afternoon or avoid the tangle of rush hour traffic in big cities. Some companies look beyond just holidays, vacation days, and sick days and also offer paid personal days and volunteering days as an added benefit.

When you assess your business and consider what it takes to keep your top employees engaged, be sure to look at ways to introduce training opportunities and flexible working options. Those are two powerful benefits that can make you stand out as an employer in a competitive market.

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