Retention Strategies

Retention strategies

Here are some of the most effective retention strategies in use today:

?Extend orientation beyond the first week. A new employee often discovers that after the first-week "honeymoon?is over, they're left disillusioned about their new position, or don't know where to turn for help. Offer continuing assistance to new hires through mentoring and follow-up meetings by human resources to check how they feel two or three weeks into the job.

?Offer deferred bonus. Provide bonuses that grow each year based on hitting performance targets.?

?Make flexible working hours, day-care, elder care and ongoing training standard benefits. Those kinds of benefits demonstrate our strong commitment to meeting different employees?needs.

?Develop a floating assignment program, in which employees spend time working in different departments or business units. But don't let critical employees move too freely from one department to the next.

?Generate positive word-of-mouth. Investing in our people can help us attract qualified prospects through positive-word-of-mouth.

?Make exit interviews more meaningful. Use information from exit interviews to categorize defections into different groups. People who leave to join a competitor should be grouped separately from those who leave because a spouse landed a job in another city. Determine what caused each defection ?lack of promotion opportunities, poor compensation, bad relationships with bosses, inadequate training. Use the results to target where we need the most improvement.

?Offer retirement-age workers part-time employment. Today, people over age 65 are more active than ever and more interested in doing part-time work such as consulting after they retire. Offer that opportunity to our retirees.

?Calculate the value of employee retention. It's easier to evaluate each employee's productivity and contribution to revenue. Developing an employee retention measurement system for other employees takes time. Focus on areas such as the amount we spend on hiring and training, the amount of profits we fail to realize because of inexperienced employees, and the potential effects on profits that an increase in employee retention might generate. The goal isn't to develop a sophisticated group of metrics,