High staff turnover seriously undermines a company’s growth. Every manager’s worst fear, it often rises sharply without anyone knowing quite why. Yet it’s a trend you need to watch closely. Plenty of strategies can help you reduce turnover and keep each employee on board for as long as possible. And the right habits start the moment you build or strengthen a team.
Spotting the threat of rising turnover in your organisation
Turnover refers to the rate at which staff are replaced within a company over a given period. This percentage reflects the pace of departures and arrivals across the organisation. Once it reaches the 10 to 15% mark, staff turnover is considered high.
Stay attentive to what your people need
To avoid being caught off guard, you need to listen to your employees and keep them motivated. That doesn’t mean saying yes to every request. To prevent turnover, HR managers and team leaders need to understand what their employees experience day to day. Team leads can help you gather how everyone is feeling. An open, natural conversation is an effective way to get people talking. Mutual support also means helping others open up.
Watch out for friction within teams, too, and address it early so frustration doesn’t build. Cohesion between team members is essential to the company’s wellbeing and its bottom line.
Take exit interviews seriously
The departures counted in your turnover rate cover every reason: resignation, dismissal, retirement, incapacity and unsuccessful probation periods all feature in the calculation. To improve your HR policy, interviews with outgoing employees are crucial. The feedback your former employees share will help you curb turnover. A structured survey is a good way to build a measurable data set. Open comments deliver quality insight and widen the scope for improvement. Feedback can also be collected anonymously. The right decisions will then motivate your people, bring them closer and build genuine team spirit. It’s a shared goal: happy employees make a high-performing company.
Measuring the cost of turnover for your company
Targets missed
With turnover running high, business continuity suffers. Constantly changing the person assigned to a task slows production considerably. Turnover has a negative impact on both the quantity and the quality of the team’s output. Your company will then struggle to hit its revenue forecasts.
A major brake on innovation
When a department faces constant staff changes, continuous improvement becomes difficult. It takes time for each new arrival to absorb the company’s know-how. However talented your recruits, the odds of successful innovation are slim when the turnover rate is high.
Rising staffing costs
Recruitment costs climb when turnover is high. For every vacancy, you’ll need to budget more for:
- Job advertisements,
- Recruitment agency fees,
- Employee referral schemes,
- Open days,
- Training.
Damage to your employer brand
A high staff turnover rate sends a very negative image of your company out into the job market. The more frequent the departures, the less appealing the company looks to candidates. It then runs short of talent to hire. Disgruntled employees may also turn the tables by posting negative reviews on recruitment platforms. Repairing that image takes all the longer.
Understanding what causes turnover
A poor working atmosphere and falling productivity
A gloomy working atmosphere saps motivation more than any other factor. Next comes sheer workload and the stress that goes with it. A poorly maintained workplace and badly designed tools also drive employees to leave.
Poor workload management
Understaffing leads to an unbalanced share of the workload and fuels turnover. The employees who stay find themselves with a long list of tasks, which breeds frustration. Workflows overflow on all sides and things get more disorganised by the day. Strengthening your teams is therefore crucial.
A weak sense of belonging
Work gives people the chance to identify with a purpose and feel they belong. So when employees’ efforts go unrecognised, their professional drive takes a hit. Simple gestures of appreciation and recognition are often enough to retain people. They can come from the manager, but also from fellow team members. Working together without getting along is never a lasting option.
Uncompetitive pay
Unattractive salaries inevitably push turnover up. Remember that we all want to earn more, and competition is fierce. Less experienced staff may settle for average pay at first, but they’ll soon join the highest bidder. Is management seeing strong productivity? Reward your people.
Little regard for the person
Being unable to balance work and personal life pushes employees out of the door. The main cause is a lack of flexibility from employers, which signals that the human side of employees is being ignored. Team performance only improves when people feel trusted.
Putting effective strategies in place to reduce turnover
Build an effective onboarding process
Your fight against turnover can begin on an employee’s very first day. A reassuring welcome for new arrivals helps keep turnover down. A solid onboarding process strengthens employee commitment over the long term. Preparing properly for new recruits helps sustain their motivation. It starts with a healthy working atmosphere. But to be even more appealing, consider running induction days that are anything but ordinary. Games for onboarding new employees are hugely popular and come in both in-person and virtual formats.
Gamification for better conversations
To retain your best talent, choose a playful, collaborative approach that helps people thrive. Gamification breaks down the top-down relationship between employees and their managers. This anti-turnover strategy encourages conversation and cohesion across teams, surfacing valuable ideas naturally. To get there, games aligned with your decision-making process must be carefully designed so the fun doesn’t take over.
Team building to strengthen cohesion
Attachment to colleagues and team dynamics is one of the main reasons employees stay. When people get on well, they gain that much sought-after sense of belonging. Building bonds strong enough to create genuine team spirit can take time. Team building activities are the answer. They often take the form of an outing, bringing everyone together in a new setting.
Coming together remotely through virtual team building is also an excellent way to strengthen bonds across borders. Connecting remotely can even be easier, since any physical self-consciousness disappears.
Every company is different, which is why Arcane Experience offers bespoke services to meet every need.
