Revolving Doors

Companies tend to lose their new employees in the first 0-6 months or at 3+ years. For the high turnover in the first 6 months, employers need to remember that just attracting employees isn’t enough. Retaining them is just as important. If you don’t have a solid Onboarding for your employees, they have other options. When they were interviewing with you, they were also interviewing with other companies, those doors are most likely still open, just because you got them to accept the offer and come in the door, doesn’t mean that they don’t still have other options out there.

A solid onboarding process makes all the difference for new employees, starting with before they even come into the building on their first day. This includes making it easy for them to complete any paperwork that needs to be completed for their first day. You should always meet employees where they are, meaning if employees don’t have computers and you require them to use a computer to fill out their new hire paperwork, maybe it’s not the best onboarding experience. Entry-level employees may not have computers, if your application was able to be completed on a phone or tablet, but your new hire paperwork is not able to be completed on anything but a computer, you may need to have another look at your process. Creating too many hoops for your new employees to jump through can also cause your new employees to get a bad taste in their mouths.

For the employees who leave around 2-3 years, most likely their reason is lack of growth opportunities. They are moving on because they have a growth opportunity elsewhere. Developing a solid development strategy for your high performing team members is important to retain the employee. This starts with leadership recognizing high performers and knowing how to grow and develop them. Make sure your leaders know how important it is to nurture these high performers and ensure they are able to move on to new roles in 2-3 years within the organization.

These new roles don’t always have be vertical, they can be horizontal, as well. Offering a wide variety of experience is a lot of times more beneficial than offering only a vertical track. By opening up their experiences in various departments and areas of the business, you are continuing to keep them challenged and interested in their work, but also growing their business knowledge.

Be creative in the way you grow your great employees. It doesn’t always have to be the same old way we have always done it.

#turnover #onboarding #development #training #attrition #smallbusinesssolutions