A new year is upon us, and as we prepare to turn the corner into 2025, managers have an opportunity to reflect. Over the last year, what worked for your team and what didn’t? Does your team have the same members it did at the beginning of 2024? What is your team’s overall sentiment about the company? In short, do they even like their jobs?
If your team’s makeup has changed in unexpected ways and you’ve lost top talent to other organizations, you may need to rethink your employee retention strategies. All too often, I’ve seen companies put their retention strategies on the back burner, only for them to backfire later when employees become disgruntled and start looking elsewhere.
Building a high-performing team is as much about maintenance as it is about construction, and for that, you’ll need strong employee retention tools. From recognition programs to a smooth onboarding process and flexible work arrangements, these are some of the best employee retention strategies I’ve seen and explain why they work.
Why Retention Strategy Matters
It should come as no surprise that unhappy employees won’t stick around very long, and consistent employee turnover will hurt your business and your team’s effectiveness.
Without a well-thought-out retention strategy, you’re flying blind in your managerial life, and that’s no way to run a business or a team. Instead of being highly productive, you’re setting yourself up for failure. When top employees decide to hand in their notices near a project’s deadline, this can be a nightmare scenario for many managers.
On the flip side, incorporating a solid retention strategy into your broader business planning reduces turnover and boosts morale. This leads to greater employee satisfaction, which has been shown to increase productivity by 12%.
Recruitment and Retention Strategies That Work
Keeping the talent you already have is one of many parts of building a high-performing team. There’s a delicate interplay between effective recruitment and retention strategies. It all starts from day one.
In my work, I’ve seen companies that have sub-par onboarding processes produce employees with initial confusion about their roles and job expectations. Right from the get-go, they’ve created a situation which sows doubt in the minds of new hires about whether they made the right decision to join your company. In fact, CareerBuilder found that 9% of employees left because of poor onboarding experiences—that’s about 1 in 10!
That’s why onboarding new employees effectively and supporting long-term employees go hand-in-hand. Formulate a strategy so that new employees can hit the ground running with minimal anxiety. Your first day on any job is filled with meeting new colleagues and absorbing a substantial amount of new information about your role.
You’ll want to reduce any feeling of being overwhelmed by a new hire, and this can be done with a proper onboarding plan. Before they even come into the office, get the pre-onboarding out of the way. A lot of this can be done online as much of it is paperwork, getting emails set up and introducing them to the company culture.
Assigning a mentor or an office buddy for their first few days is a great way to get them acclimated to the company culture. No one wants to feel like they’ve been thrown into the fire all on their own, and during that first week, many employees are reluctant to reach out for help if they don’t know anyone. Help them break the ice by breaking it for them.
Then, consider what goals you want your new employee to hit in the first few months on the job. What should they accomplish? This is a critical period for any new employee to reinforce their feeling of worth and provide value to the team. So, create some concrete deliverables and targets to hit that you can then provide feedback on. This creates a channel of communication with a new hire that lets them know where they stand, reducing anxiety about their work and improving performance and retention.
Tools to Enhance Employee Retention
Once they’ve been properly onboarded, you’ll need to incorporate effective employee retention tools to ensure their satisfaction on the job.
Many companies are implementing peer-to-peer recognition software like Nectar and Bonusly to drive employee engagement and provide actionable feedback and recognition about their job performance. Getting a bit of recognition for your work among team members has been shown to increase engagement, productivity, and performance by 14% compared with companies without these recognition tools.
What’s more, feedback and survey tools like TINYPulse and SurveyMonkey can increase employee engagement by allowing managers to create personalized surveys and forms to garner insights into employee satisfaction as well as how they see themselves within the company.
One manager used TINYPulse to generate a question for his employees each week, one of which was, “If your company were an animal, what would it be and why?” Their answers gave insight into how they saw the company growing and the general sentiment among the team.
Building Long-Term Employee Loyalty
If you’ve got great employees, the way to keep them is to recognize their contributions to the team. Even small gestures help to build long-term employee loyalty, as people ultimately want to feel valued for what they give to the team.
You can do this in a number of ways, for example, by offering extra time off, implementing an employee of the month program, or simply publicly acknowledging their efforts through announcements or a company-wide email.
I’ve also seen some companies successfully utilize points-based recognition systems in which employees are rewarded with things like gift cards or experiences.
By recognizing and rewarding employees, you increase employee retention and motivation. The positive reinforcement from knowing you’re doing a good job makes people want to continue doing so, bumping productivity and employee satisfaction.
Measuring the Success of Your Retention Strategy
How would you know if your retention strategy is effective if you don’t keep track of the outcomes? You can utilize feedback tools to gauge employee satisfaction but also keep an eye on metrics like your overall turnover rate, retention rate, and absence rate. If you notice employees aren’t sticking around more than a year or so or more employees are calling in sick more often, you might have a problem.
Giving your organization an edge in retaining top talent also means listening to and acting on the feedback from those employees. If you start a feedback program at your business and never act on your employees’ suggestions, they will soon notice and lose interest in participating, perhaps even leaving the company.
Preparing for Retention Challenges in 2025
A few workforce trends are likely to continue in the new year, such as employees prioritizing work-life balance and looking for responsiveness from management.
For example, while the new paradigm of hybrid and remote work may give employees a bit of that work-life balance they’re seeking, the physical distance between management and staff in these arrangements can create its own challenges. That’s why it’s important to have adequate tools, like feedback and recognition software, at your disposal to mitigate these issues.
Planning for the Future
Any business without a solid employee retention strategy is bound to fail in that department, which means haemorrhaging top talent and losing out on productivity. If you want to keep your business thriving, you have to support the people that keep it running.
It’s been my experience that prosperous businesses solicit feedback from their employees (and act on it), recognize employees’ efforts, and effectively onboard new talent. What this all boils down to is that you need a thorough plan for your recruitment and retention strategies in the new year to keep your employees engaged and reach the next level.
If you’ve found my insights useful, you may want to sign up for our monthly newsletter. It’s chock full of even more actionable advice and strategies you can use to keep your team as dynamic as possible. If you sign up, you’ll also be among the first to get access to my upcoming book, “The Retention Productivity Link,” an exploration of how to build high-performing teams and keep them that way.
