9 Crucial Tips to Reduce Employee Turnover

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When all the hard work and investment you put into hiring turns to dust as workers leave in droves, you need to understand how to reduce employee turnover. 

From little flexibility to feelings of unfairness, there are a plethora of reasons that people leave companies. And without a plan in place to spot the early warning signs, you’re simply preparing to fail. 

That’s why we’ve put together 9 crucial tips to reduce employee turnover — whatever your industry. We’ll go through the entire lifecycle of an employee, identifying the best areas to intervene and keep your employees happy in both the short and long term.  

So if you’re having trouble managing employee turnover, our 9 crucial tips are the best place to start. 

1. Be clear and honest about the roles you’re recruiting for

In a strategy for how to lower employee turnover, it’s easy to forget all the work you do before your recruits even join your team. This tip is an easy one — set honest expectations for your roles as you create job ads. No job is ideal, but if you try to sell a basic role as a dream job, you won’t hold on to your employees for very long.

By being fully transparent about what the job entails and what you offer as a company in terms of pay and perks, you can keep your staff happy and reduce employee turnover. Be open and consistent about what success means both on a personal and a team level. This way, you reduce the likelihood of people feeling treated unfairly — a major cause of disengagement and burnout. 

As a manager, you can use technology to reduce your unconscious biases. Time management and performance assessment lets you set reliable metrics that you can refer to in appraisals. This helps to improve employee turnover by creating a fair workplace, but also allowing you to set achievable personal targets that are a great motivator. 

2. Hire smart, not fast

When it comes to hiring, the golden rule is to avoid short-term impulse hires. It’s almost always best to get the right person rather than to plug a hole only to have to disrupt your team again shortly thereafter. 

Hiring the right people isn’t about interviewing half the world’s population and picking the one with the best vibes. You’ve got to have hiring processes in place that remove biases and ensure you make a smart, calculated decision. 

Being meticulous about your skill gap and hiring the right profiles to strengthen your team is the starting point in reducing employee turnover. If you recruit someone who doesn’t add much to your department, it’s a ticking time bomb before they start feeling frustrated and leave by one route or another. This kind of hiring and rehiring is costly and disruptive to your team, so you ideally want to get the right abilities for both the short and long term. 

In addition to the skills-based assessment, always check for the cultural fit too. Even the best individual performers can hold a team back if they don’t gel with others on a personal level. Therefore, when it comes to your in-person interviews, create a checklist to assess how well your applicants will fit into the group.

3. Offer opportunities for internal progression

If you don’t offer your workers the opportunity to develop their career, you can’t blame them for looking elsewhere for their next step. Therefore, it’s essential to offer a clear career path both to attract the best talent, and to reduce employee turnover in the long term. 

Training sessions are a great way to keep morale and aspirations high. You can run your own workshops or get third parties in to help individuals improve in their current role or branch out to different areas. This gives your staff a feeling of progression in their careers, which is a key factor in managing employee turnover. 

You can achieve an even greater sense of progression by favoring internal hires to external ones. When word gets out about how you invest in your staff, you’re more likely to attract loyal workers who can see a sustainable future in your company. Internal job boards are the best evidence of a business that wants the best for its employees. You can list all your vacancies on your company intranet and post announcements of new positions in everyone’s newsfeed.

4. Assign the right people to the right jobs

Sure, it’s important to get the right skills into your company, but that’s not quite enough. Good people management is perhaps the most effective way to reduce employee turnover, and it’s not exactly rocket science. 

Hiring the right people is a great starting point, then it’s all about putting people’s skills to best use. Speak to your employees to get an idea of what they would like to be doing and you’ll soon have a highly motivated team.

At the other end of the scale, pulling your staff in different directions won’t only lead to poor performance, but you’re highly likely to demotivate your teams and even cause resentment. Therefore, deploying your team members according to their skills is an easy win in your efforts to reduce employee turnover.

But what happens when you have large teams and you’re not familiar with your entire talent pool? One simple solution is to create an organizational chart with a short profile and skill list on every individual. That way, you can be meticulous about how you put together your teams. 

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5. Be flexible with working hours

Modern managers know how to avoid employee turnover by offering flexibility in working hours. Yes, it can be a bit scary when you spend so long planning your team’s working hours, but a bit of flexibility is a great way of inspiring loyalty. 

We’re not advocating for a total free-for-all. All collaborative teams need a good chunk of the day when everybody is online at the same time. However, you can easily reduce employee turnover with a simple shift in working hours. For example, you can allow parents to start an hour late, giving them some quality time to take their kids to work. 

As a manager, you can keep tabs on who is doing what with team calendars with a clear weekly visualization. You can easily plan your collaborative tasks when everyone is present at the same time, and improve employee turnover by keeping people happy. 

Aside from being excellent for your employer branding, flexible working hours can also alleviate stress on your workers. Therefore, you’re not just retaining your top talent, you’re keeping them performing at their best too. 

6. Allow for remote or hybrid work

There has been a rapid revolution in working conditions. It happened so quickly, if you blinked you could have missed it. The technology for remote work has been available for a long time now, but the normalization of remote work is somewhat more recent. Now, we’re in a different world, where strict in-office policies are often a catalyst for staff leaving.

Top profiles have suddenly realized their worth, and if they don’t get a bit of flexibility, they’ll simply look elsewhere. Furthermore, work-life balance has been under the microscope for years, and plenty of people would rather not work than be tied into a micromanaged position. 

This trend shows no sign of stopping, either. As gen Z makes up an increasing section of the workforce, managers are having to become creative to reduce employee turnover. There are of course benefits to a physical office — it’s a space that’s purpose-built for work, after all, and collaboration can be seriously improved. That’s why so many managers are opting for a hybrid working format, which offers flexibility while still prioritizing team engagement. 

7. Hold regular one-to-one meetings

When you call your employees aside for an appraisal, you are making a proactive effort to resolve problems early. Aside from showing that you value each individual and are invested in their happiness, your meetings can cover a range of topics that will reduce employee turnover, such as:

• Any issues that are making them feel unsettled

• How they see their position in the future

• Training sessions they would like to attend

• Suggestions for new directions and improvement in the team

• Changes to working conditions

The support shown through these personal meetings is crucial to keeping morale high and preempting disengagement in your team. By addressing issues before they snowball, you can retain your best talent and improve conditions for future workers. 

8. Don’t neglect those social connections

One of the key reasons that people leave companies is because they feel disconnected from their team. Especially important for remote teams, you need to focus on creating strong bonds that reduce employee turnover in the long term. 

Starting on the cloud, which is ideal if your team is spread across different locations, you can make instant messenger chat channels for social niches. Whether it’s for sharing recipes, making weekend plans, or posting cat memes, these connections are incredibly important. 

If your team is in the same city, suggest informal events shaped around a fun activity. Escape rooms are all the rage these days, but a night at the bowling alley can be just as good. Seeing your colleagues in a different environment is just the tonic for making each individual feel valued. 

Don’t fall into the trap of seeing the social side of things as wasted time. While you can’t allow your teams to be distracted throughout the entire day, good social connections lead to better collaboration and more unity in your team — and nobody wants to leave a place they love.

9. Do your own research into what makes people leave (and stay!)

All of the tips on this list will help to reduce employee turnover no matter your company or industry. But not every team is the same, and it’s important to look into the specifics of your own organization to really improve employee turnover. 

Start off with periodic employee satisfaction surveys. Make them anonymous for the most honest answers and you might uncover some home truths. Humans aren’t perfect and we all have our blind spots, so these forms will help you identify any structural or personal issues that you can address. 

Shape your questions to get a summary of specific issues, but also leave an option to bring up anything you haven’t covered. On the other hand, you can get quantitative data by including a sliding scale of satisfaction. This is great for pulling out facts and figures that you can use to attract new talent. 

You’ll never be able to stop everybody from leaving, however. But in the crisis, there is an opportunity. More and more companies are implementing exit interviews to drill down into why a worker is leaving. The results of exit interviews can play a major role in reducing employee turnover in the future. 

Final Thoughts

Now you’ve got a firm grasp on how to avoid employee turnover, it’s time to start implementing them.

But we wouldn’t advise trying to juggle all these new tactics without a structured, smart framework for the biggest impact. 

Bitrix24 has everything a responsible manager needs to keep their team happy and engaged. From clear, intuitive project management software and multiple communication channels to performance analysis and a full HR management system, you get a full suite of tools all on the same app. 

So if you want to find out how to lower employee turnover and structure your work like a boss, sign up for Bitrix24 for free today!

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