Why Employee Retention Should Be Your Top Priority in 2025 and Beyond
Recent years have seen phenomena like quiet quitting and the Great Resignation–employee retention is a struggle these days. On top of that, job seekers with top, in-demand talents may have more options, with remote work being more available than ever before. Finding great employees and focusing on keeping them on your team is vital in this otherwise volatile climate.
At Technical Search Consultants, as a premier staffing agency in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, we know how to help employers find great talent. Here we’ll share what we know about retaining that talent and building a company up from within.
What Is Employee Retention?
The term is pretty self-explanatory–employee retention is the ability to keep employees as part of your organization for an extended period of time. A company’s employee retention rate is the percentage of employees who carry over from one year to the next. Naturally, every company will experience some turnover, due to matters outside of anyone’s control, but high turnover can indicate a serious problem within a business that’s leading people to leave earlier than they perhaps otherwise would. A 90% retention rate is the recommended ideal that businesses should strive for.
Taking the discussion a step further, we could also say that employee retention isn’t just cold data about how many people are in chairs at the office–it’s also about how engaged and invested those same workers are. Are you retaining their passion and dedication, too? Or are they just going through the motions? Whatever the reality is, it will show up in other data points, and it could eventually lead to turnover. So, in the end, employee retention is a simple statistic, but it’s also a comprehensive strategy that can be implemented to ensure that employees remain satisfied and engaged.
Why Employee Retention Matters
Losing an employee means that you’ve also lost all the time, effort, and money you’ve invested in training and development. It also means that you’ll need to reinvest those resources in someone else who can fill their vacant role. Onboarding is a costly process, and focusing on employee retention is one way to reap dividends on that investment. By retaining your workforce, you keep productivity steadily moving along, and don’t have to halt operations in order to bring someone new up to speed and then allow them time to ramp up proficiency. This is especially true for someone in a particularly skilled or senior position. Employee turnover directly impacts your business’s bottom line for the worse. On the other hand, employee retention allows you to allocate valuable funds elsewhere.
High employee retention also has a positive knock-on effect when it comes to your company culture. Folks who stay around tend to do so because they align with company values and goals, and the longer they stay, the more this is reinforced, so you have a strong, solid, and meaningful bond with your employees on a moral and ethical level. When greater numbers of employees achieve this solidarity, it encourages company-wide consistency and fosters a more enjoyable and efficient work environment. And when employees feel part of something bigger, they inevitably strive to improve their performance. This, too, enhances overall productivity and the company’s financial standing.
More often than not, when one employee is disgruntled, they aren’t alone. Whether it’s a process, policy, or person who is causing the friction, if they decide that enough is enough, they may not be the only one to leave. And should more than one employee leave at the same time, this can drag down other’s morale, leading to an overall feeling of dissatisfaction in your workforce and potentially even more turnover. In this tumultuous economy, no business can risk that!
Employees’ satisfaction cannot be overrated, as it can also directly impact the attitudes of your customers and impact how your business is perceived online. This, in turn, can impact whether or not you attract more top talent to your company in the future. Building brand reputation helps to build loyalty among customers and clients–the whole situation is one big win. We could go on about how employee retention positively affects every aspect and level of your business, but we think that you probably get the point by now and are imagining even more ways that you can benefit from keeping your employees happy and right where they are–working hard for you. Now the question is, how can you improve employee retention?
How To Improve and Maintain Employee Retention
Remember this vital truth–people leave jobs because of the experience, not the job itself. Even the most trying task is made better by considerate workmates and management that truly listens. If the experience of working at your company makes the job unsustainable for an employee, that’s a systemic issue that needs to be addressed before retention can be a serious goal.
On the other hand, if the experience is a great one, then an employee will think twice before leaving, because they don’t want to leave the kind and understanding manager and supportive team members. Employees who are acknowledged and allowed to grow are also going to feel more valued and vital to your company than someone who is routinely rebuffed and dismissed. The job is the same, but the employee who feels part of something bigger and who understands that their work has purpose will naturally have a deeper commitment and a sense of dedication that’s harder to shake. In turn, they’ll likely progress in their performance and become more and more vital to their team. Commendation fuels that fire, and the positive cycle continues. Give employees room for expansion and additional job opportunities, and you’re creating a built-in retention model.
Another big part of employee retention is that they receive and feel their employer’s respect. Employers who are empathetic to their employees’ needs and who are willing to be flexible when possible will find that these seemingly simple actions go far to building loyalty and can have a massively positive impact on retention.
Are you unsure about what your employees need to feel invested in working for you? Why not ask them! Regular surveys and exit interviews will give you the data you need to make changes or go even deeper on what’s already working. Knowing and understanding what they’re looking for from their work and from your company can help to ensure that you’re doing all you can to build and maintain employee retention this and every year.
Your Local Staffing Agency in Cleveland and Pittsburgh
High employee retention rates should be every modern business’s goal, but you have to start somewhere. Working with agency search consultants is a great way to ensure that you’re employing the skilled, high quality workers who you are going to stick around for years to come. You do your part and create a company culture that’s built for retention, and we’ll do ours, delivering you the top candidates that you’ve been searching for!
Looking to fill an open position in the Office / Administration, Engineering, Manufacturing / Industrial, or Information Tech industries? Technical Search Consultants can help. Take the best step you can toward prioritizing efficiency in your next hiring campaign and contact us to learn more about our process. It’s time to invest in your workforce and get the results you’ve been missing. Contact us today!