Retaining Employees for the Long-Term

Finding employees who will stay with the company begins with recruitment. It's important to carefully screen candidates and make sure they're a good fit for the company. If a candidate has the right skills but their ultimate career goals lie elsewhere, they probably won't stay long. It takes time and patience to find someone who is just right for the job.

It's also important to offer incentives not only to get candidates to accept the job, but to encourage them to stay. Raises, bonuses, extra vacation time and other benefits are worth the cost to the company. The costs of lost productivity, training and recruitment due to turnover are much greater.

Salary and benefits aren't the only incentives. Employees also want to stay when they're fulfilled and have a clear path for growth. Provide educational opportunities and a transparent path to advancement. Give employees standards of what's expected in order to be promoted and provide feedback on how they can improve.

Be open to accepting feedback from employees to find out how to improve employee satisfaction. If there's a problem within the organisation or if there's a personal conflict, it's better to find out about it early than to hear about it after someone resigns.

In a large company, doing anonymous surveys of employees on specific issues can help to gauge areas that need to be addressed to keep employees happy. Find out what the major complaints are and try to rectify them. You can also use HR records to measure patterns of turnover. There will always be some turnover, but good management can keep it to a minimum.