Is your employee retention strategy working?

If your company is continuing to leak talent despite competitive salaries and benefits, here are some common mistakes you might be making.

1. Keeping Your Eye on the Wrong Ball

The job market is hot and you’re swamped sorting through resumes to fill open positions. While you’re trying to find the right candidates, your permanent employees are burning the midnight oil—and burning out. When the new hire comes on board, guess what? One of your best employees heads out the door for greener pastures.

You don’t need us to tell you that this is a problem in many ways. First, your new hires are talented but new. No matter how brilliant someone is, it still takes time to get them up to speed on your company’s products or processes.

Second, who is going to get them up to speed? You may have lost a worker at that crucial senior level where they could mentor the newbies.

Third, in focusing all your efforts on filling a vacancy, you inadvertently created another. In the end, your heroic efforts to find the perfect candidate didn’t get you any closer to filling your capacity.

What happened? While you had your eye on new hires, you took it off the talent you already had. They were doing a good job and were appreciated but they didn’t know it because no one bothered to tell them. It’s not unlike elementary school—you lavish so much attention on the new kid that your best friend feels unappreciated. Before you know it, she’s hanging with another crowd.

Sometimes the tiniest bit of attention and appreciation go a long way toward keeping employees motivated. While a simple “thank you” can suffice, a “thank you” accompanied by a gift card and a “thanks for holding the fort while I get through this interview process” can do even more. Better yet, implement some of these achievement recognition ideas like…yesterday.

2. Getting Stuck in Limbo

Limbo is that difficult position between having enough customers for your staff and having enough staff for your customers. You don’t want to hire more staff until you get more customers, but you’re too short-staffed to effectively service the ones you already have. Maybe it seems better to expect your employees to just work harder and for longer hours, but the harder they work, the more mistakes they make, putting customer relationships at risk. It’s a vicious cycle.

How do you break out of this doom loop? Recognize that your employees are human. This means they need sleep, days off, even some time during the day to step out of the office for some fresh air or check their Facebook page. Hire a freelancer to plug the holes until you can effectively balance the workforce with the workflow.

3. Boxing Your Employees into One Job Position

One great way to give employees incentive to stick around is to give them opportunities to advance their careers. This means more than slapping “senior” onto their title. Is there a position they can aspire to? Is there a new skill they can learn?

Even if there is no higher position than the one they have, are there more rewarding responsibilities that can be added? Can you put them in charge of starting a mentoring program? Can you send them to a conference or let them learn a new skill? We've heard that one DART ePass company is even bringing for-credit college classes to their campus. Ask your employees what they are interested in (and it doesn’t have to be work-related) and let them guide you to ways you can help them be more fulfilled in their careers. 

4. Being Inflexible

If you don’t embrace a policy that offers flexibility, you’re going to lose eventually. Workplace flexibility is a benefit that most people value and that millennials value even more than a higher salary. As more millennials enter the workforce and start to have children, they are going to demand flexible hours, the opportunity to work from home, and the opportunity to bring their own device, their baby or their dog to work. It’s not because they are self-centered—they are looking for balance in their lives.

Letting your employees come in late so they can watch their daughter’s school play is a win-win for both of you: it keeps them more engaged, loyal and productive and it keeps you from having to replace their position when they get a better offer.

According to LinkedIn, on average, millennials will change jobs 4 times in their first 10 years out of college. So, what can you do to close the revolving door?