It’s hard to realize the impact of high employee turnover until you lose one of your most credible and experienced employees. And while you always find the replacement for that employee, sometimes it can take months or even years to be able to fill that place completely, especially if the employee was too efficient with his or her job role.
Reducing Employee Turnover
In simple words, letting your top performers go can be detrimental to your business in the long run. Therefore, it is crucial that you take all the important measures to ensure your loyal and efficient employees stick around to achieve all the concrete benefits of reducing employee turnover,
Here are some of the most important advantages you cannot ignore:
Productivity
You cannot help but watch your production go down when employees, especially your most experienced ones, leave the organization. It is almost impossible to maintain consistent production, even if you find a replacement soon. The new employee may require weeks or even months before he or she is able to produce at the same level. Ensuring the retention of such important and experienced employees can help avoid these disruptions.
Reduced Cost
You cannot replace an employee for free. In fact, it can be pretty costly to find someone to fill in a place that was previously taken by an experienced employee. According to a study by the Missouri Business Net website, the cost associated with replacing a former employee could be equal to a whopping 1/3 of the new employee’s annual salary.
To find a suitable candidate, organizations put up ads, lose the current time that would have been productive otherwise, and even take time to train the new employee. Then there is an intangible loss too. Losing an experienced employee also means losing the expertise and knowledge about how the organization works. Retaining your current employee will definitely save you from incurring these costs.
Maintaining Customer Loyalty
If your organization deals in customer service, letting go off your old employees can be damaging. Customers tend to create a certain comfort level with people they usually deal with. Having to speak to new people and seeing new faces can be both confusing and irritating for the customers.
Your experienced employee may have many loyal customers that they deal with on a regular basis. They may have known people by name, preferences, and even by purchase history. This is the kind of information that the new employee will learn with time. By retaining your experienced employees, you can continue to maintain your customers’ loyalty without any trouble.
Smooth Work Routine
Sometimes it can take more than several weeks to find a suitable replacement for your former experienced employee. This pushes the organization to involve other employees to fill the gap. This would also require other employees dividing their resources into two different job roles and even increase their hours. As a result, the workload could become stressful for all the remaining current employees.
This could cause the business to lose more employees in the long run. You cannot stress your workforce or make them unhappy while you’re also searching for the replacement as this could have a negative impact on worker productivity. By reducing employee turnover, the organization can maintain a great level of stability within the workplace.
Reduced Training Time
Naturally, employee turnover eats a lot of time. First, you spend a lot of time finding a suitable and reliable employee for the post. Then, you go onto round two of interview, assessment, and negotiations. Next, it could take even longer to have your selected employee on board with you. Last but not the least, it takes further time to train the new employees about their job role and responsibilities. All of these long hours can become a headache for human resource.
If the organization focuses on retaining the employees instead, it can successfully cut down all this time and continue to work with experienced employees, who are the real assets to the company.
On the other hand, it is also important to note that increasing employee retention and working on disengaged employees can also help you hire new employees. If a company maintains a great employee experience within the organization, it is definitely going to boost morale. Happy and satisfied employees work as effective training and recruitment tool.
Conclusion: Reduce Employee Turnover to Build Companies
If you are a part of the HR, you’d know how seriously beneficial employee retention is. The key is to strengthen your employee retention policies and spend more time improving employee morale and strategizing on how to improve employee experience instead of wasting time in hiring and firing.
We’ve summarized the most imperative benefits in this article to help you understand the importance of retaining experienced employees. So regardless of the industry you operate in, set ‘employee retention’ as your number.1 priority to achieve all the above-stated benefits and many more.