Even at the best of times for employers, turnover rates can be a problem. Many employers try to find different reasons to excuse the high turnover rate. Unfortunately, they may specifically look for causes to the problem that absolve them of blame and fail to come up with adequate solutions to fix it. To help employers realize where they may have gone wrong and recognize what they have to do right, we have compiled the Do’s and Don’ts of lowering your business’ employee turnover rates.
1 Do: Offer Pay Raises and a Strong Starting Rate
There are many things that every prospective employee looks for in a new job, but arguably the biggest one is the pay rate. Even when you start with your job, you want to ensure that your job will help you afford to live a normal, healthy, and happy life. If your business does not offer a good enough pay rate to start, you will be lucky if you can get them to take the job, let alone stick around for very long. However, having a reasonable starting rate is not the only thing an employee should expect from their pay.
2 Don’t: Malign the Employees for Leaving
No matter how much employees quitting affects you and your company, the best thing you can do when they quit is to show grace. Unfortunately, too many employers try to make the situation as hard and as frustrating as possible, which may reveal exactly why these employers, in particular, are experiencing so many issues when it comes to keeping people from quitting.
By being cordial and wishing them well on their new career path, you will have forged mutual respect between employee and employer. This respect can go a long way, ranging from the employee possibly wanting to return to work for you again in the future to the employee being willing to recommend their friends and family consider working for you. There is not any good reason why you have to be sore about an employee quitting.
3 Do: Allow them to take time off from work
All too often, businesses do not appreciate just how important it is to provide adequate time off. Even with your regular days off, a person will inevitably experience burnout if they have to do that 9-5, five days a week. Even if it works for you, a routine needs to have some time to breathe. If you don’t allow them vacation time, their productivity and quality of work will lower, but they will eventually quit in most scenarios.
However, vacation is not the only thing you should offer your employees regarding time off work. Sick leave and childcare leave are both critical, and they should be treated as different benefits for your employees.
Finally, make sure that your employees can take off time often enough and conveniently enough. Even with businesses that do have these available, a key issue is that some employees may have more opportunities to take the ideal dates off (like Christmas and Thanksgiving), whereas others have to suck it up. Forcing employees to work on holidays, especially if they have to do it repeatedly, is a great way to lose employees (especially on the dates in question!).
4 Don’t: Change their vacation days
Look, we get it. It is not easy to handle being down an employee, especially during a busy year. And heck, you may be justified in getting your employee to change their vacation around, but more often than not, if you try to make them work on those days, you should not be surprised to find out that they put in their two-weeks notice over that. Worse, they may not even give you those two weeks.
Painful though it may be, as a manager, you need to ensure that you can manage your employees and their schedules adequately. Even if you were right to have them work on their vacation, being right does not count for anything if they will meet that demand with “no” and quit their job.
5 Do: Recognize them for their work
One of the biggest issues with being an employee is feeling like your labor is not valued. There are several things you can do to make employees feel more appreciated, one way being to use employee recognition programs.
6 Don’t: Prioritize some employees over others
In some businesses, they struggle with issues to do with clique behavior, which leads to certain employees being recognized over others. Employee recognition is valuable for all employees, but it is easy for certain more well-liked employees to take advantage and get more attention than is appropriate.
