It’s a well understood fact, it’s far more efficient to retain your best employees versus attracting new, qualified employees. Just the amount of time it takes to train and bring someone up to speed can, in some cases, take a year before a new employee is turning out the same quality of work as their predecessor.
Creating and maintaining a workplace where your employees thrive and feel a strong sense of belonging is crucial to the life of your business. But, we all realize that retaining your great employees can be costly and can be a real challenge in certain industries.
While keeping your best employees certainly requires that you offer a competitive pay, employee retention has to do with way more than their compensation package.
Fostering a business with a great culture that ensures your employees feel valued and satisfied requires intentionality from leadership.
Communicate Well and Often
Identifying brokenness in your employee communication is the first step you can take to provide an optimal workplace to your employees. The best way to identify brokenness is to assess trends in complaints, frustrations, conflicts, and misunderstandings your team has experienced. Is there a process, a trend, or any consistency to the problems happening? What’s the bigger issue?
Then, begin to strategically address the communication shortfalls. When expectations are clear and processes are refined, things go smoothly for your employees and they can enjoy their work and their co-workers more, which has a direct impact on their job satisfaction.
Retooling processes and strategies for communication can be a challenge, though, if you’re not thinking outside the box. Ask yourself: how can you effectively improve your communications strategies without adding to your workload or reducing work time from your team’s working hours? You don’t want to bog people down with excessive meetings or emails, after all.
Systems to automate announcements, reminders, and information are key – particularly in large workplaces where there are many people and moving parts. This is where digital signage can be a huge benefit to any workplace as an employee communication strategy – one person can automate the distribution of any message across numerous worksites at a moment’s notice.
When your employees know what’s going on, they feel more plugged into your team and your leadership. And, when they feel more connected, they’re likely to feel a deeper sense of satisfaction… it’s pretty hard to leave a job you’re satisfied with.
If you’d like to learn more strategies for improving communication your workplace, we’d love to help. Click here to download our free communication guide for Human Resources managers.