Employee Retention:- Employee Retention involves taking measures to encourage employees to remain in the organization for the maximum

period of time. Importance Of Employee Retention Now that so much is being done by organizations to retain its employees, why is retention so important? Is it just to reduce the turnover costs? Well, the answer is a definite no. Its not only the cost incurred by a company that emphasizes the need of retaining employees but also the need to retain talented employees from getting poached. The process of employee retention will benefit an organization in the following ways: 1. The Cost of Turnover: The cost of employee turnover adds hundreds of thousands of money to a company's expenses. While it is difficult to fully calculate the cost of turnover (including hiring costs, training costs and productivity loss), industry experts often quote 25% of the average employee salary as a conservative estimate. 2. Loss of Company Knowledge: When an employee leaves, he takes with him valuable knowledge about the company, customers, current projects and past history (sometimes to competitors). Often much time and money has been spent on the employee in expectation of a future return. When the employee leaves, the investment is not realized. 3. Interruption of Customer Service: Customers and clients do business with a company in part because of the people. Relationships are developed that encourage continued sponsorship of the business. When an employee leaves, the relationships that employee built for the company are severed, which could lead to potential customer loss. 4. Turnover leads to more turnovers: When an employee terminates, the effect is felt throughout the organization. Co-workers are often required to pick up the slack. The unspoken negativity often intensifies for the remaining staff. 5. Goodwill of the company: The goodwill of a company is maintained when the attrition rates are low. Higher retention rates motivate potential employees to join the organization.

6. Regaining efficiency: If an employee resigns, then good amount of time is lost in hiring a new employee and then training him/her and this goes to the loss of the company directly which many a times goes unnoticed. And even after this you cannot assure us of the same efficiency from the new employee. Employee Retention Strategies 1. Hire the right people in the first place. 2. Empower the employees: Give the employees the authority to get things done. 3. Make employees realize that they are the most valuable asset of the organization. 4. Have faith in them, trust them and respect them. 5. Provide them information and knowledge. . Keep providing them feedback on their performance. 7. Recognize and appreciate their achievements. 8. Keep their morale high. 9. Create an environment where the employees want to work and have fun. Retention Myths:There are so many tactics and strategies used in retention of employees by the organizations. The basic purpose of these strategies should be to increase employee satisfaction, boost employee morale hence achieve retention. But sometimes these strategies are not used properly or even worse, wrong strategies are used. Because of which these strategies fail to achieve the desired results. There are many myths related to the employee retention process. These myths exist because the strategies being used are either wrong or are being used from a long time.

These myths prevent the employer from successfully implementing the retention strategies. 1. Employees leave an organization for more pay: Money may be the motivating factor for some but for many people it is not the most important factor. Money matters more to the low-income-employees for whom its a survival issue. Money can make an employee stay in an organization but not for long. The factors more important than money are job satisfaction, job responsibilities, and individuals skill development. The employers should understand this and work out some other ways to make employees feel satisfied. When employees leave, management tries to retain them by offering more money. But instead they should try to figure out the main reason behind it. Issues that are mainly the cause of dissatisfaction are organizations policies and procedures, working conditions, relationship with the supervisor and salary, etc.
2.

Incentives can increase productivity: Incentives can surely increase productivity. What really glues employees to their work and organization is quality work, meaningful responsibilities, recognition, respect, growth opportunities and friendly supervisors. Employees run away from responsibilities: It is a myth that employees run from responsibilities. In-fact employees feel more responsible if they are given extra responsibilities apart from their regular job. Employees look for variety, greater control on the processes and authority to take decisions in their present job. They want opportunities to learn and grow. Management can assign extra responsibilities to their employees and appreciate them on the completion of these tasks. This will induce a sense of pride in the employee and will improve the relationship between the management and the employee.

3.

Retention Success Mantras:1. Transparent Work Culture:- A transparent work environment can serve as one of the primary triggers to facilitate accountability, trust, communication, responsibility, pride and so on. It is believed that in a transparent work culture employees rigorously communicate with their peers and exchange ideas and thoughts before they are finally matured in to full-blown concepts. It induces responsibility among employees and accountability towards other peers, which gradually builds up trust and pride. More importantly, transparency in work environment discourages work-politics which often hinders company goals as employees start to advance their personal objectives at the expense of development of the company as a single entity. 2. Quality Of Work:- Organizations need to be more flexible so that they develop their talented workforce and gain their commitment. Thus, organizations are required to retain employees by addressing their work life issues. The elements that are relevant to an individuals quality of work life include the task, the physical work environment, social environment within the organization, administrative system and relationship between life on and off the job. 3. Supporting Employees 4. Feedback:- Feedback acts as a channel of communication between the employee and his manager. The amount of information employees receive about how well or how poorly they have performed is what we call feedback. It is a dialog between a manager and an employee which acts as a way of sharing information about the performance. It suggests where the employee performance is effective and where performance has to improve. Managers can provide either positive feedback or negative feedback to employees. This feedback helps the employee to assess his performance and identify the improvement areas. 5. Communication Between Employee and Employer:- Communication is a process in which a message is conveyed to the receiver by the sender. The message may be or may not be in a common format or language that both the sender and receiver understand.

Hire Right Talent Employee Retention starts with recruitment. Early departures arise from the wrong recruitment process. Here are a few ways to ensure how to hire the right talent for a particular job. 1. Hire appropriate candidates. Hire candidates who are actually suitable for the job. For this the employer should understand the job requirements clearly. Dont hire under qualified or clearly overqualified candidates. 2. Provide realistic job preview at the time of hiring: Mostly employees leave an organization because they are given the real picture of their job responsibilities at the time of joining. Attrition rate can be reduced if a right person is hired for a right job. Realistic preview of the job responsibilities can be given to the employment seekers by various methods like discussions, trial periods, internships etc. 3. Clearly discuss what is expected from the employee: Before joining the organization, tell the candidate what is expected from him. Setting wrong expectations or hiding expectations will result in early leaving of employees. 4. Discuss what the expectations of the employees are: Ask employees what they expect from the organization. Be realistic. If their requirements can be fulfilled only then promise them. Or tell them before hand that their requirements can not be fulfilled. Dont show them an unrealistic picture. 5. Culture fit: Try to judge individuals capability to adapt to the organizations culture. A drastic change in the culture may give a culture shock to the candidate. 6. Referrals: According to the research, referred candidates stay longer with the organization. There is a fear of hampering the image and reputation of the person who referred the candidate.