How to Reduce Employee Turnover

Employee turnover has become an increasingly serious problem as the number of employees to chose from has diminished in recent years. Turnover rates can vary at different branches of the same organization. The main reason for this can be pinpointed to several explanations. A few of these are listed below:

1) Managers each have their own leadership style and how they interpret and implement work policies and procedures. The reason this is allowed to occur has been no written uniform guidelines for hiring and retaining employees have been designated by the home office. This has been known to cause employees to try to transfer from one department to another. The "grass in greener on the other side of the fence" theory would be an excellent interpretation.

2) Low morale can be caused by offering the wrong or no incentives to employees. The right incentives can go a long way in enticing employees to stay with the company. Incentives can be long term or short term. An example of long term incentive would be good affordable health insurance, that employees would become eligible for after working a ninety day trial period. The business would pay a percentage of the premiums. This would be something to strive for. Today, health insurance has become an expensive necessity. A short term incentive would be "Employee of the Month" awards with either cash incentives or paid days off. There are more incentive ideas that management can either research and implement with corporate approval or hire a company that fitting the appropriate incentives to the right business is their job.

3) Little or no motivation to encourage employees to improve productivity on the job. It is up to management to find positive ways to motivate their employees. A well written job description is a positive beginning so employees know exactly what their job duties entail. Mentoring has been known to turn around the bad performance of an employee. A show of appreciation for a job well done is another motivator that shows management is aware of who accomplishes what in the business.

In conclusion, to lower the employee turnover rate in a business, management must work toward finding where the problems are and remedy them in a timely manner. If they choose to do nothing, their turnover rate will increase along with the operating costs of perpetual training of new employees.

Learn more about this author, Carolyn Teasley.
Click here to send author comments or questions.

---

Add your voice

Know something about How to reduce employee turnover?
We want to hear your view. Write now!