Replacing an employee costs businesses thousands of dollars in opportunity losses, productivity slowdowns, training expenses and more. As a general rule, the higher your ex-employee’s salary was, the more expensive it is to fill their shoes.
That truth puts a big economic stake in your ability to retain an employee for as long as possible.
So, what makes an employee stay at a job? In reality, a variety of things that are too numerous to recant in a single blog post.
At the end of the day though, all of the variables that might push people out the door come down to one core idea…
Happiness.
This raises the issue of how you can create a happy working environment that can positively affect your team’s perception of working for you.
There are a handful of ways to accomplish that end. Below, we touch on what we think are actions that are worth taking.
1. Integrate Work-life Balance Into Your Culture
A lot of companies like to throw the term work-life balance around. When it comes down to it though, there’s pressure on team members to prioritize work over their broader existence.
The only way that you can make people feel comfortable about taking their personal lives as seriously as they take their jobs is to bust the stigma around taking breaks.
You can do this by taking breaks yourself and by reminding employees that you’d like to see them take their vacation time.
2. Create an Open-door Policy
Nobody likes to feel like a second-class citizen in their place of employment. While managers never set out to make their team members feel that way intentionally, a vertical hierarchy’s realities breed classicism unintentionally.
An easy way to help people feel valued despite their position on the totem pole is to implement an open-door policy. This policy should dictate that anybody in your company can ask questions or make comments to anybody else.
Nothing makes team members feel more important than their ability to speak their truth to those around them.
3. Be Flexible With Hours
A common suggestion when it comes to creating a happier working environment is to offer your employees more vacation time. That suggestion is a good one but it may also be one that your organization can’t afford.
A great middle-ground solution to giving your employees more control over enjoying time away from the office is to allow for hour flexibility.
An example of hour flexibility might be allowing an employee to work 4, 10-hour days rather than 5, 8-hour days.
4. Empower Your HR Team
Finding innovate strategies for improving HR directly impacts the happiness of your broader team. That’s because HR is your team’s go-to resource whenever they have questions or concerns about their job.
HR departments that are bogged down with poor workflows and staffing issues are not going to be able to be anywhere near as responsive to your team’s concerns as they could be.
On the other hand, HR departments that are running smoothly have the bandwidth to ensure that employees in your company are getting everything they need.
5. Clue Everyone In
It’s common to see people at “coordinator” levels in a company treated as cogs rather than equals. Those coordinators progressively start to feel contempt for the machine that they’re apart of and are almost always looking into other opportunities.
Avoiding that trajectory is as simple as taking a moment every week to meet with your broader team. In these meetings, you should make everyone aware of the challenges that are being faced at your company’s executive level. You should then solicit feedback on how to solve those issues.
6. Guide Team Member’s Careers
Great business owners are not only good at managing their employee’s day-to-day output; they’re also good at helping employees manage their long-term career ambitions.
If somebody pulled 5 of your employee’s names out of a hat, would you be able to clearly state their career objectives?
If you’re like most owners/managers you wouldn’t be able to
That’s a problem because leaders that don’t know what their followers want don’t know how to make them happy which, as you know by now, leads to high employee turnover.
Take the time to sit down with your team regularly and ask about what they want. Once you know, work with them to find pathways in your business to achieve their goals.
7. Let People Know That You Notice Their Hard Work
Hard workers like to be recognized for their efforts. Doing something as simple as pulling a person aside and thanking them achieves that end and promotes more productivity.
You can even take recognition a step further by having an annual team awards event where you formally acknowledge top performers.
8. Lead By Example
A lot of what makes a happy working environment comes down to a business’s leaders.
If a leader is embodying what he/she asks of their employees, employees will take those cues and follow suit. If a leader asks a lot but exemplifies nothing, contempt will start to breed and subordinates will start looking for other opportunities.
Embody the attitude that you want to see in your workplace and we promise you that you will start seeing more of it.
Create a Happy Working Environment
If you take the actions that we’ve outlined above, you’ll come away with a happy working environment and a higher rate of retention.
That should mean something to you because those outcomes will put thousands of dollars back into your organization’s pocket and positively impact your team member’s lives.
Are you looking for more advice on how to get your business to run better? Keep reading our blog.
