Your employees are one of your business’s most important resources. If you think individual employees bring something exceptional to bear, odds are that other employers will as well. To keep your best personnel with you for the long run, you have to compensate them well. Of course, good compensation isn’t the only thing that people value in an employer. There are several other important things that you need to do to retain great staff members.
Make Safety Your Number One Priority
Show your employees that their health and safety matters. In addition to comprehensive training, you need to invest in helping people do their jobs safely.
Make sure that all equipment is in safe and operable condition. Protective gear such as goggles and gloves can substantially reduce the risk of injury in many different job settings. If employees have to perform any work at a height, it is a good practice to provide equipment that has a security cage in order to prevent falls. Also, electrical upgrades to make a workplace safer can preclude preventable harm that could result in serious injury and potential liability. Ultimately, people will appreciate all that you do to put their safety first.
Bridge the Gap Between Remote Workers
There are obvious challenges to building a strong company culture and fostering team-driven dynamics when employees don’t share a workspace. Not interacting together directly doesn’t mean that people have to feel isolated in their positions. You can help your employees develop good communication with tools to stay organized. Project management and workflow management tools can equip people to collaborate with one another effectively.
To keep remote workers engaged, you need to make an effort to bring them together in ways that are wholly about team building and forging connections. Giving people the opportunity to connect informally through a virtual happy hour is an excellent way to engage your team members and make work more fun.
Give People Enough Time Off
Vacation time is key to a healthy work-life balance. It supports your workers’ productivity and staves off burnout.
Create a generous vacation time schedule. Consider pooled time off that combines sick days and vacation days. People tend to be understandably comfortable about having to persuade employers that they’re sick. When possible, combining two categories of time off puts people at ease about being able to take time away from work when they aren’t feeling great or just really need the break.
Make Expectations Clear
People who aren’t sure about how much employers expect of them have trouble identifying and attempting to achieve performance goals. They may overwork themselves because of uncertainty about how they’re doing in relation to what you expect of them. Alternatively, they may put forth minimal effort towards completing key job functions just because they’re waiting for feedback indicating that they’re doing something wrong. Either way, people who don’t know what defines doing a good job can’t know if they’re doing a good job. Understandably, they may not find their work gratifying. Make your expectations about on-the-job responsibilities with thorough written job descriptions
Don’t let poor personnel management prevent you from hanging onto your top team players. When you give people a fantastic working environment and you equip them to succeed, they’ll want to stay on with you. When people stay on for an extended period of time, it enables you to get the greatest possible return on everything that you’ve invested in them. Also, it spares you from having to expend resources on recruiting and ramping up a new person in vacant roles. Furthermore, people who don’t have their sights fixed on greener pastures will be better able to produce great work.
