Innovative Employee Retention Strategies: Amplify Success

high employee retention

As a manager, have you ever designed innovative employee retention strategies? Does your company care enough for the employees to retain them? Taylorism’s element of rendering the employees as mindless work machines is an abandoned practice in the world, however; there is still big room for savoring an ideal employee-organization relationship.

On average, labor demand is less throughout the world than its supply so we have more unemployed people and fewer available jobs. We have a more educated workforce with less utilization and employment opportunities. Due to limited opportunities, this workforce is forced to work in tough working conditions. Hence, overburdening the employees, paying them less, and firing them without any valid reason is part of organizational routine oppression. In doing so, organizations fail to understand that this damages their market reputation and threatens their survival. If you are one such organization, quit this exercise today.

Survival through innovative employee retention strategies

Competitors are always actively trying to catch your competent workforce. When you fail to retain your employees, you allow your competitors to acquire them. Strategically speaking, these are your poor human resource management policies that fail to establish the real role of this department. Once you begin to follow this course, it becomes a norm in your organization to deprive employees of their rights. So, eventually, you are not only going to lose the competitive workforce, but your market reputation will also corrode; leaving you crippled in the industry.

Implementing innovative employee retention strategies is currently the most important corporate challenge worldwide because high employee turnover directly escalates your expenses. Less employee retention leads to more new hiring thus, increasing your hiring, onboarding, training, and development expenditures which would have been less if you had focused well on employee retention. The better alternative is training and developing existing employees to attain a specialized skill set, leading to achieving organizational goals. Remember that the people working for you are regarded as the ”assets of the organization”. Your financial statements also call for multiplying your productive assets. Investing wisely in human assets enhances its value as the better your employees sprout, the taller you grow.

The most innovative employee retention strategies

Let us talk about the best innovative employee retention strategies. There are many but, these four alone can work wonders for your long-term survival.

1) Respecting Your Employees

Respecting your employees is the smartest way to retain them. Trust me, if you respect your employees, you make them feel worthy. They will ignore many other dissatisfying job factors if you feed them respectfully. This is one of the most common reasons that your employees leave you; they don’t feel respected.

Respecting employees includes developing civility in the workplace. This includes treating everyone in the company with politeness, honor, and care. Admiring the employees for their talent and achievements is one important element we usually forget.

I have seen the bosses who admire you for your achievements and then, insult you the next moment. So, respect has to be a consistent show in my view.

And some people do not hold the respect for experience and age. This one thing is so common nowadays you won’t even notice it as something that shouldn’t happen.

Acknowledging employees’ achievements can be tangible (money, benefits) or intangible (praise). Therefore, making and implementing a respectful policy is one of the biggest contemporary organizational requirements.

2) Happy Skill Growth

Make employees feel they are not growing in their careers and not getting enough opportunities to develop their skills. Today, it is critical to consider the interests of employees and provide them with growth opportunities in the areas of their interest. This facilitates more involvement of employees in the job and they tend to respond more actively to the development programs designed for them.

They tend to stay in the organization where they see themselves as not only growing in skills but also along the hierarchy.

3) Customize the Compensation

Do you know customizing the compensation for every employee is a great idea to retain them? It sounds ridiculous but some of the top companies are doing it today to enhance employee retention levels. In fact, this is one of the most powerful innovative employee retention strategies. While devising our management strategies, we must understand the psychology of the human resource which drives its needs. Every person is motivated by a different stimulus. Every employee’s compensation must be tailored according to what inspires him. I have seen many people who are highly encouraged by fringe benefits more than cash. And there are people who want only cash; no benefits.

It might sound laborious to tailor the compensation mix for every individual but trust me, once you do this, you enhance employee loyalty. They are happy because they are being paid the way they want it. This sense of authority triggers the feeling of employee voice which makes the employees stay loyal to you.

4) Clear Communication

This one missing element is the reason that many employees abandon. You do not communicate clear performance expectations to them or you do not involve them in setting their goals. 75% of the times, employees lack explicit guidance from the management; not knowing what to do. Communicating vaguely and expecting the employees to figure out everything themselves is not a recommended practice. In such cases, it is a usual outcome that employees are unable to achieve their goals or do not perform as expected. Many times, they quit the job due to this communication gap.

Constant communication gap leads to employee-organization conflicts and discourages employee in taking initiatives.

Learn in my another article the best ways to communicate effectively in the workplace.

Some great add-ons for devising innovative employee retention strategies

The effect of implementing the above explained innovative employee retention strategies is magnified if we attach some great add-ons to it. Let us have a look:

1) Hire for culture

Research suggests that if employees are not able to get along well with the company culture, they quit their jobs. Hiring for cultural fit is one of the most considerable elements today when employees ask for good working conditions more than ever. This is one of the number one reasons of employee turnover.
Hire people for new ideas and innovative practices but also check for at least an average level of cultural fitness. This will make sure that you do not have to cope with a heap of employee exits later.

2) Offer better benefits & incentives

Although discussed above as an essential element of your employee retention policy, it can be separately offered as an add-on when your high performing employee is leaving the job and you wish to stop him. Offer him better compensation: benefits or basic salary whatever you feel is valuable to him. In this case, you need to understand his needs so that so can better negotiate with him. Here, your aim is to retain a dissatisfied but high performing employee.

3) Offer career advancement

This retention strategy is applicable where you need to give room to your good performers for promotions both in routine or when they are leaving. In ideal situations, always encourage vertical career growth as promotions. But when your high performers wish to leave, offer them some better positions. The purpose is again to retain the valuable assets of the organization in every possible way.

Are you going to adopt these innovative employee retention strategies?

You achieve real success when your employees quit looking for other jobs and feel thrilled working with you. They feel secure when their organization takes care of them and their families. When they foresee their bright future with you, expect to develop professionally and enjoy their journey of growth. Once you engage your employees by formulating a motivating employee retention policy, it will be a lifetime relationship.


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