It is no secret that the United States is in the middle of a retention crisis. Each month resignations or "quits," as the Bureau of Labor Statics calls them, reach a new record. HR and benefits leaders are working hard to reduce turnover and fill vacancies.
Consider this before you start handing out raises and bonuses to keep people from leaving. How can you make your company a place no one wants to leave?
Making our company,
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Here are some hard and soft benefits you can use to make our workplace and employee magnet. The good news is that these benefits are inexpensive to implement.
Recognition: Gallup calls employee recognition a "low cost, high impact" tool for retention, and the lack of it the number one people leave. It doesn’t have to cost you a thing — save the time to give your teams much deserved praise. But while 72% of employers told Gallup they have effective recognition programs, just 37% of employees agreed.
I follow the work of happiness at work researcher Shawn Achor, who found that employees given one piece of praise per day are 30% more productive. He is not alone. Research by Great Places to Work found that recognition had the highest impact on employee dedication — 30% higher than a raise.
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We give regular recognition to employees in a couple of ways. We survey our customers on their experience every day. The goal is to identify problems quickly and provide daily positive feedback to the employees who deliver our service. Every morning we review the positive feedback from the entire company.
Learning:
Achor's research found that 90% of employees would choose to earn less for greater meaning and growth at work. That is huge. A learning platform does not have to be expensive. Coursera offers free courses on everything from negotiation to machine learning. You just give them the time.
Our experience at Prialto bears out Achor's findings. We offer an online professional development platform, and our employees love it. Our 200+ employees completed more than 8,000 courses in 2021. One wrote me a note and said, "I got a fantastic job and access to a learning platform? Is this Christmas?"
Listen: Ask for and act on employee feedback. The cascading crises of 2020 taught us the importance of listening. We could not make assumptions about employees' experience because we were in uncharted territory. Being heard in the workplace has never been more important to us. A study by
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But it would help if you did something about what you hear. We survey our employees every day, asking them, "Has Prialto been a great place to grow today?" As with our customers, we want to act quickly on feedback. The survey also reminds us that employee growth is one of our highest priorities.
Inexpensive, but not easy
I said that these benefits are inexpensive. They are. Recognition, learning opportunities, and gathering employee feedback does not have to cost a lot. But they all require a commitment to intentionality and transparency that are not always easy to come by. You cannot fake it. It is more meaningful and fun to view your business as a growth platform for employees and customers and a rich challenge to make it better every day.
