How to boost employee retention in an uncertain economy

With workers exerting more power in the labour market, organisations are going to have to think outside the box to get them to stay – here are four tips to get you started.

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Entrepreneur

For much of the pandemic, the biggest challenge facing businesses was getting workers through the door. Now, with employment levels similar to where they were before the COVID-19 pandemic began, the focus for companies is shifting to retention. But the old way of thinking about retention just doesn’t work anymore.

Here are some effective retention strategies culled from Entrepreneur’s research.

Incentives matter

Plenty of jobs already offer end-of-year bonuses to employees, but 12 months can be a long time to wait when job tenure is steadily decreasing. Now some of our business partners are scheduling payments that workers can receive after as few as three or six months, provided they stay in their jobs. 

Incentives can also take the form of promotions, but it’s harder to align expectations about what promotions imply in terms of pay, timing and responsibilities. By contrast, everyone understands cold, hard cash.

Growth is not optional

The previous section wasn’t to say that workers had no interest in career progression — they most certainly do.

A business that lays out a clear career path for new workers is more likely to gain their commitment, as long as they can see other workers following the path successfully. Especially today, when workers have more choices and autonomy, they need to be able to picture themselves picking up skills and responsibilities as they gain seniority.

Providing avenues for growth has become more complicated as the labour market becomes more flexible and multifaceted. Some workers may be full-time, others part-time and more might pick up shifts on their own flexible schedules. Yet these days, even flexible hourly workers like the ones on our platform are finding career paths.

Companies often offer training shifts to start, then regular shifts to workers who complete their training. Then these workers can be added to rosters, offered long-term assignments, and finally hired permanently.

Workers want to move up the skills ladder, too; we see workers on our platform going from prep cook to line cook, or from entry-level warehouse associate to an intermediate position.

Be positive

When Entrepreneur sifted through thousands of pieces of workplace feedback for our inaugural State of the Flexible Workforce report, we found two things that mattered most to workers besides money: the attitudes of their teams and the atmospheres that surrounded them.

Workers attached enormous value to colleagues who were helpful, supportive, cheerful, and instructive. They also gave kudos to businesses with clean, well-lit, well-organized and temperature-controlled spaces.

Small things also count

In the past year, organisations have been raising pay, adding benefits, increasing flexibility and offering extra training, all to increase retention. These strategies can work, but they’re expensive. Sometimes cheaper perks can give businesses more bang for the buck — and even make them stand out from the competition.

Just think about things like the quality of your coffee, the feel of your break room and even something as mundane as the ease of scheduling shifts. If you can do the big things right, then you can do the little things right as well. Workers will notice — and then you’ll notice when they stick around.