How to Reduce Attrition of Employees? - 8 Most Effective Ways!

This blog discusses practical strategies for lowering employee attrition in an organization and preserving an organization's most talented employees.

What is Employee Attrition?

Employee attrition is a concept involving employees leaving their jobs in a company. It simply refers to the number of employees who left the organization in a period of time. There are four reasons for employee attrition:

• Voluntary: when the employee leaves at his own choice
• Involuntary: when the employee is fired or let go
• Retirement: when the employee takes retirement
• Internal Attrition: when the employee transfers from one division to another

High employee attrition is bad for the company. Loss of important talent is an obvious reason along with losing money in their investment and spending hours every week trying to fill the gaps after they are gone. It also produces a bad reputation.

A lot of the time, the main reason for attrition is stressed employees or employees facing burnout. A bad work environment could be a major factor. Such problems can be solved by investing in an employee wellness program.

Check out Resiliency Program to measure stress & burnout at your company and develop a resilience plan to help your employees achieve peak performance.

How to Reduce Attrition of Employees?

Now that you know what is employee attrition, let’s see how to reduce attrition of employees in an organization.

• Build a healthy work environment

  A work environment is a place where all the employees execute their job roles and responsibilities. It does not refer to just the cubicle or seating arrangement, but also how everyone in the company including peers, managers, junior/senior team members, HRs, and bosses interacts with each other.

  Building a healthy work environment is about creating an atmosphere in the office where every employee feels comfortable and happy. This can be achieved in various ways.

  • Have comfortable seats which keep a good body posture and offer personal space as well as easy accessibility to peers.
  • Promote healthy communication between employees which is free of rude, offensive or any other negative behaviour.
  • Show constructive criticism that does not affect the relationship between two employees.
  • Availability of healthy snacks/cafeteria for people to be social.

• Appoint the best team leaders

  If your projects are not going as well as planned, can your manager maintain positive team spirit? Can they give constructive criticism without affecting their relationships? Will they offer proper planning and support when it comes to handling workload?

  Team leaders and managers play a very crucial role in reducing the employee attrition rate. They largely impact the experience of employees working in the company. Appoint team leaders that can create a meaningful connection with their employees and create a positive impact in their life. Often employees feel stress due to work pressure.

  A good manager can help in such cases with proper management of their workload. Hire someone who can offer clear communication on job expectations, organise teamwork, and offer support & flexibility to employees.

• Promote creative freedom

  Give your employees the freedom to be creative. Don’t just order them and drop a deadline. Let them use their own minds and show their creativity. As their boss or manager, you must appreciate it as often as possible. Encourage them to give opinions and respect them. Give them enough time to bring you something of quality. This way employees enjoy their work and find it interesting.

  Ask them what they are good at and appoint work accordingly. You can utilize their skills, even more, this way. You will end up with a more enthusiastic environment and fewer employees who would want to quit.

• Offer promotions & appreciate the employees

  One of the main reasons why employees jump to the next boat is for better salary and promotion. And if they can achieve that in their current organization, then what is the need right? If you appreciate the work your employees have been doing and you wish to keep them, then offer them salary appraisals or promotions.

  You can promote the trend of internal promotions too. For example, when a manager leaves your company, instead of hiring a new one, you can offer this position to a junior employee who has good experience and you think can handle the demands of the position.

  This will encourage other employees to work hard and stay in the company for a similar opportunity.

• Give them the opportunity to learn

  Along with career development, it is also important for the employee to develop their skills. You can offer professional courses and certifications for your employees that help them advance. Hold occasional seminars for training in several skills. Employees who show perfection in certain skills can try out other areas as well. This will keep them interested. They will feel like they are growing the most in your company and would want to stay as long as possible.

Additional Tips on How to Control Attrition

The points mentioned above are the necessary key elements a company needs to have in order to have a good employee attrition rate. After establishing those, here are some additional efforts you can make for more effect.

Tips on how to control attrition of employees

• Conduct anonymous surveys

  Create a survey containing questions regarding the satisfaction of the employees. Ask them how they feel about working here. Post questions about workload, management, salaries, training, skill sets, etc. keep the survey anonymous so your employee can be honest. This will bring you some insights into what you need to improve on.

• Exit interviews

  As your employees exit the company, conduct an interview on the last day to know about their experience. Ask them what they liked and disliked about the company. Understand their reasons for leaving.

• Talk to new hires about their onboarding

  After their probation period ends, have a chat with new employees. Get to know if their onboarding was smooth. Did they understand their roles and responsibilities easily? Were other employees welcoming? Ask about the first impression of the company.

  All these insights directly from your employees will help you the most and save your time figuring out what’s exactly needed.

  We hope our pointers on how to reduce attrition of employees were helpful to you. If you are worried about your employees being stressed or burnout, if their work is being impacted heavily, or if you are having trouble with high attrition of employees due to these reasons, then definitely cheek us out - https://resiliencyprogram.com/