Don’t wait for when your employee churn rate rises to take action. The most effective way to lower churn is to prevent it. Put your people first with these five ways to reduce and prevent employee churn.
Improve the Onboarding Experience
Your biggest opportunity to engage and retain employees starts from the moment they join your organization. That’s why a strong onboarding program is a critical piece of the puzzle.
A positive onboarding experience provides a solid foundation for building long-term relationships with team members. Connect new hires with the people who matter most across their employee journey — especially their managers — so they feel confident about facing any challenges. Our recent research found that employees who feel connected are over four times more likely to be “very satisfied” with their jobs. These connected workers are 50% less likely to depart within the next 12 months.
Having that support network from the very beginning helps new hires acclimate and sets them up for greater success.
Provide Competitive Pay and Benefits
Pay and benefits are among the biggest factors in employee churn. People are more likely to leave an organization when they feel their compensation doesn’t match their contributions. And the allure of greater compensation elsewhere can draw people away.
Benefits are increasingly important as people weigh their career options. As costs rise for health care, child care, and education, people are looking to their employers for solutions.
Complex financial investments are often a balancing act. While there are limits to how much you can increase pay and benefits spending, keeping tabs on what’s most important to your workforce can help you prioritize your budget to have the biggest impact on retention.
Communicate Clear Career Paths
Most people want to evolve and grow throughout their careers. But if they can’t see the opportunities for growth within your organization, they’ll start looking elsewhere.
Develop clear career paths so team members can see where they can move within the business. Match internal career paths to specific skill sets and learning opportunities. This way, workers can see where their skills will be most useful and what they need to develop.
Train managers to communicate these internal training and development opportunities to their direct reports. Use your HR workflow software to prepopulate messages that managers can share with their teams to help them see their opportunities for internal mobility.
Build a Positive Company Culture
Culture plays a huge role in reducing employee churn. For better or worse, the attitudes, norms, and behaviors that define your company have a big influence on the employee experience, and anyone who feels isolated or excluded from those norms is at a higher risk of disengagement. Similarly, people are more likely to disengage if they feel that your culture is at odds with their personal values or that it didn’t match what you promised during the hiring process.
Track engagement and the state of your culture is through regular surveys. Staying attuned to the workforce’s perspective on culture helps you get ahead of problems and proactively drive positive change. Make it a point to intentionally connect people across the workforce to strengthen what’s great about your culture. Use your employee experience software to establish workflows that foster connection and bring people together.
Help People Find Work-Life Balance
The increased awareness around mental health has driven conversations about what healthy boundaries look like between our work and personal lives. People who feel overworked and burned out are more likely to seek employment elsewhere or drop out of the workforce.
Train managers to help team members understand their capacity. Encourage honest conversations about what people can and can’t commit to, and how they work best.
Emphasize the importance of wellness. Your benefit offerings play a key role here, but many workers aren’t aware of what’s available. Develop a content campaign to raise awareness of your resources, help people understand their unique stressors, and overcome challenges related to burnout.