There’s really nothing better for a business than having a team of professionals work together for the long haul – all striving to achieve a common goal.

Where everyone really has a solid idea of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Where you know that you can rely on someone, because they’ve proved themselves time and time again.

According to the Yukon Bureau Statistics Survey of 2008, it’s been found that over 85% of employers tend to increase wages in order to keep employees; but we’ve found a more sustainable way to do it, that isn’t just about the money.

These are our 5 strategies to achieve employee retention bliss:

1. It all starts at the hiring process

Recruitment is a deceptively difficult process, and an often overlooked part of relationship longevity.

Creating the perfect team needs to be done from the ground up. It’s essential that the exact right people hired; they need to have the right personality for the job, the company, and for the current team. Interestingly enough, most employment relationships that end within the first year are due to culture mismatches – not a lack of skills.

We have put a lot of thought and effort into our recruitment process – and it’s been so worth it! To see our full process and get all our tips and tricks you can read this post. For now, though, here’s one quick and dirty tip that we’ve found invaluable:

Video submission:

We’ve found that asking candidates for a video application is a quick and effective way to get the measure of someone before having to make contact with them.

It allows you to see how they communicate, read their body language, judge their energy and get a better sense of their personality – and do all this before you agree to meet them.

Interviews and email back-and-fourths take time and energy; a video application is the perfect way to avoid all this while still getting great intel.

2. An awesome company culture

This is something that’s easier said than done. Many companies may think they’ve got a great company culture (foosball tables and drinks on Friday nights), but it goes much, much deeper than that.

An awesome company culture needs to really show how much a company cares for their employees. They can’t just say that they care, or just have care as one of their “values”. I’m talking about a culture that allows their employees to grow, and develop their own skills.

A company that genuinely wants their employees to achieve a work-life balance that makes them happier, and more productive. Not to mention, more loving towards their job!

This is why company culture is so, so important for employee retention.

We’re pretty proud of our company culture here at CleverClicks. So much so, that we wrote a blog post about it (of course!). You can also check out what we wrote about 5 other awesome company cultures you can learn from here.

3. Align company vision with your employees

Our team here at CleverClicks all believe in what we do. Our goal is to help businesses grow quickly, and this is something everyone in the team is very passionate about.

Here are some proven ways to ensure that the vision of your employees are closely linked to that of the company’s:

• Setting team goals – As you may know already, we’re extremely goal-orientated. Setting team goals is something we aim to do monthly, which really brings us closer to the overall strategy of the company. We encourage each other in reaching these goals, and provide help along the way.  We even have a huge board in the office with all our team member’s individual KPIs, just to make sure we’re on track!  
• Employee feedback – This is something that’s highly valued in our team. The future growth and development of our business isn’t just determined by our CEO. He has in-depth discussions with everyone in the team in terms about how we’d like to see the company grow, as well as more frequent meetings regarding what we think we could be doing differently. Everyone in the team fills out anonymous surveys, and we rate our happiness out of 10. We’re currently sitting on an overall happiness-score of 9.25!

4. Establish trust in the team

Trust within a team can go such a long way. Once you start trusting your employees with doings tasks on their own, something incredible happens: It becomes their task, and there’ll be nothing they want more than do an amazing job with it.

These are some great ways to establish trust in the team (besides hiring people with similar values in the first place):

• Milestones – Something we do here at CleverClicks is determine a number of milestones for each team member, which they’ll aim to accomplish by the end of the month (with tasks split up for each week). We’re encouraged to tackle these tasks in our own specific way, asking for help along the way wherever we need it. There’s no micromanagement, and minimal stress. At the end of the day, they’re our milestones, and we’re trusted to accomplish them the best we can.
• Remote working – Nothing says “trust” more than remote working. When we’re working at home, we know that we’re being trusted to work as productively as possible, and this trust gives us the urge to deliver our best work possible. In addition to this, we’re allowed to work on a flexible schedule in order to really nail that work-life balance.
• No doctors notes – this is just an example of one of a number of ways you can ensure that there’s trust in the working relationship. If employees are feeling under the weather, you’re going to want to let them take it easy and regroup. You’re asking for some A-grade resentment if they’re forced to get out of bed and acquire a doctor’s note to prove they really were sick. Although, if everything mentioned above is checked, you’re not going to have employees fake illnesses to get out of work anyway.

5. Personal Growth

We are huge believers of personal growth here at CleverClicks, and you should be to!

We set aside a few hours every week to learn new things and improve our skills in digital marketing, which is incredibly rewarding.

We also have individual monthly meetings with our amazing business coach, who helps us optimise our personal workflow and achieve the results we want. .

6. Bonus tip

Be the boss you’d have wanted as an employee.

“Employees don’t quit jobs. They quit managers” – Steve Maranda (Centre for Advanced Human Resource Studies).

Steve Maranda estimates that poor man-management causes an unbelievable 80% of employee turnover!

So if you can be the boss you’d have wanted as an employee, there’s no doubt you’ll be able to form a team who are in it for the long haul!

Conclusion

So, if you’re having some issues with employee retention, you’re not alone. And if you’re thinking of splashing the cash to make your employees happy, you may want to think again.

Achieving the perfect employee retention rate isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible if you follow our 5 strategies.

Best of luck!

 

Resources:

https://wheniwork.com/blog/7-great-employee-retention-strategies/https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/76456#ixzz2h4AUGAFFhttps://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/3-strategies-to-increase-employee-retention#sm.0001gqzg7k1cwgfq0rh64qr4q4b97https://www.roberthalf.com/accountemps/blog/improving-employee-retention-5-ways-to-keep-your-staff-happy

Tags: company culture, Employee retention