Employee Retention Strategies needed in your Start-up

An African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone if you want to go far, go together”. A company starts with a vision of one person then people come along. A start-up can result from one person’s vision but if it has become a successful business, then there are many people who shared the same dream and worked as a team that carried this caravan to new achievements.

In general, Individuals coming together with a common purpose, on a common platform to achieve the common goals of an organization as well as to earn a living for themselves are called employees. They are assets of an organization and being an employer, your success is totally based on the efforts made by your employees. If they are facing some problems, or not working properly due to any X, Y, Z reasons, the loss will be totally yours.

Employee retention for long duration becomes a key factor for the organization’s growth. It is the techniques employed by the management to make the employees stay longer with the organization. Employee retention strategies include:

Plan Retention before Hiring

Replacing an employee is a costly affair, which costs roughly around 20% of an employee’s salary. Your HR manager needs to understand, hiring the right talent is crucial. Have a brief discussion with your hiring manager before they hire candidates. They should have a clear idea about the work’s demands such as experience, values, degree, and skill-set.

Salary & other Benefits – Employees’ Motivation

As per a survey, around 45% of employees quit their job due to salary. This reason was followed by better career opportunities, better after salary benefits, and work location.

After seeing these insights, you can think, why monetary motivating factorssuch assalary, rewards, including health insurance, EPF, ESI, promotions, etc. are important. Around 89% of companies use financial incentives to retain their employees. Apart from these benefits, you can take care of the family of your employees by providing several benefits including medical benefits to their family, holiday trips, etc. This will help your employees to connect with you and your organization, emotionally. Not always, but if you treat them as a family, they will treat you as a family.

ConduciveWork culture

Are your employees psychologically well to work at the company? Do they look motivated when they come or they look happier when they leave? It is said that an employee doesn’t leave the company they leave the boss. Monitoring team leaders and their behaviour towards their fellow mates is as important as monitoring the team’s profit graph. A mentally exhausted and unhappy employee can never give dedication to your work requires. Understand their needs and wants; create a department dedicated to employees’ wellness at the workplace if possible.

Employee Engagement

For any organization, retention is a real issue &need to be addressed, in any case,whether you are a start-up or already running on high turnover rates. Increasing employee engagement can be helpful always, in improvingretention and also results into a better productivity and increased employee satisfaction.

Employee engagement can be achieved by involving employees in business planning process, knowledge sharing activities, etc. We don’t want you to be mixed & fixed, will talk more about employee engagement in another write-up. Let’s walk along with employee retention strategies here.

Open Door Policy

Top management is not easy to access in organizations. Most of the time people have bitterness against the company management and they don’t have an idea to raise it. Many of them don’t even discuss those issues in the exit discussion also.

Many a time, employees want to share their view/idea direct to top management, to get recognised. But they can’t do that due to the filtration of middle management.

Now, this is something every organization should think of. They need to create an open-door policy and definitely not just on paper. Nowadays, it’s easy to create online forums/query points to allow your employees, shout their hearts out. Also, you need to address those concerns and take suitable actions to avoid dissatisfaction among your employees.

Respect Diversity

Every person has his own pace to learn and perform. Some are slow but steady, and some might prove to be fast-paced runners. Some take a lot of time still lack in delivering quantity but outrun everyone in quality work, however, there are few who can deliver work in bulk but with compromised quality.

It is true that every person gets the same training, equal knowledge transfer, and live practice session, but you can’t expect the same outcome from everyone. As soon as you find out and divert the energy the better it would be. Respect this diversity and have faith in your decision.

ESOPs for Early Employees

Retention of early & great employees can be planned by offering them ownership of your company. Employee ownership can be offered in multiple ways. They are provided to buy stocks of the company directly, many times offered as a bonus which can be received through stock options, or can be gained through a profit-sharing plan.

Employees feel ownership and work for long in an engaging way. This is a win-win situation for both the organization & employees.

Training and Growth

Individuals join any organization to put forth a strong effort, to learn and grow. Beyond any doubt, you are giving them training and providing them up for workshops.

You should enable & encourage them to upgrade themselves in their career by providing them cross-functional training, help them developing new skills and explore bigger opportunities in the organization.

Let’s wrap up concluding that your employees aren’t automatons, movingaround for a paycheck only. They are living beings, who also care about their workplace, nature of work, people with whom they work with& many more. In this tight & competitive job market, it’s always important to keep the above points in mind instead of involving in an unbeatable wage bidding war which could wipe out your bottom line, most of the time.