Dealing with staff turnover can be a very demanding, stressful and costly aspect of management. Employee attrition can put a lot of strain on an organisation, and more often than not it’s totally preventable. Figuring out how to reduce staff turnover should be one of your top priorities if it wasn’t already.
You might be worried about the time and training investment that new employees represent. Or you might be concerned about losing your once-loyal top talent to greener pastures. But your specific reasons don’t change the reality: It’s on you to cut turnover by communicating better with your people.
Now more than ever, leaders need the proper tools to manage engagement, performance and wellbeing in their team. Especially now that hybrid and flexible working is becoming the norm.
A weekly check-ins is an effective employee engagement strategy. It ensures you have a regular system of feedback which can help you hold onto your top talent. For good.
The cost of employee turnover
The average cost per case of staff attrition in the UK in 2019 was over £30,000. Obviously, salary and seniority are major factors. But employee turnover also costs you in several other ways. From employee severance to the costs of hiring their replacement. And the lost productivity during their onboarding and learning curve.
The latter is especially significant in specialist roles that need a certain level of training. Depending on the skills required, new employees can require weeks, if not months of training. Even after training, new employees can take a while to fully acclimate to their role.
How wellbeing impacts staff attrition
Wellbeing, as well as employee engagement, determine whether a business can hold onto its best employees. We’ve talked previously about the different kinds of wellbeing, which include:
- Physical wellbeing
- Mental wellbeing
- Social wellbeing
- Financial wellbeing
Last year, a study of Korean bankers found that job stress (perhaps unsurprisingly) increased the likelihood of turnover. It shows that job satisfaction can mediate the impact of stress on someone’s intention to quit. However, work stress also had the secondary effect of eroding said satisfaction.
What else impacts staff turnover?
Well, it’s far more than just salary and perks (though these can play a role for sure).
Employees are also at risk of turnover if they feel ignored by their employer. A study from early 2020 highlights this. Of the respondents planning to leave their job that year, one third did so because of a lack of feedback or opportunities. This shows that managers who don’t engage with their team run the risk of pushing them to quit.
Job satisfaction suffers when employees feel like they aren’t being fairly rewarded or recognized. That’s also true for a lack of opportunities for advancement. According to Gallup, 32% of employees cited a lack of promotional opportunities as the reason they quit.
How a weekly check-in can help reduce staff turnover
That Gallup study found that 75% of reasons given for turnover could be influenced by managers. There’s a worn-out adage about quitting managers not jobs that we won’t waste your time with.
But managers can only act when they know there is a problem. Without the right tools or data, it can be very difficult to spot problems on the horizon. Left unchecked, these cause staff turnover to become unavoidable. Without the right gear at hand, your managers’ ability to reduce staff turnover across their teams is greatly reduced.
This is why, especially mid-lockdown, employee check-ins are now more important than ever. And trust us, there is plenty of evidence showing the desire for more frequent feedback. This desire is particularly strong in the Millennial and Gen-Z workforce. So we would urge you to consider the use of a weekly check-in for your employees.
Cabin fever that results from social isolation can negatively affect physical and mental wellbeing. Managers have a duty of care to help their employees prevent this, so supportiveness and empathy are vital. It provides them with a much-needed sense of empathy. this can be of huge benefit to job satisfaction, engagement and ultimately improving productivity. And that’s to say nothing of how it can reduce staff turnover.
But it can be much harder to gauge a staff member’s experience and state of mind remotely than in person. A weekly check-in can make all the difference in the world. Engage365’s check-in system offers total flexibility for everything from the questions asked, to check-in frequency and performance management framework used.
How Engage365 check-ins work
You can run your Engage365’s check-in through Microsoft Teams, Slack, mobile or web. The basic question types for a weekly check-in include:
- Text
- Recognition
- Yes/No
- Multiple choice
Combining rating scale questions with open-ended ones, gives managers a good mix of quantitative and qualitative information. This provides vital detail about their team’s wellbeing to figure out the likelihood of turnover. The ability to respond to specific answers enables management to address problems as early as possible. You can also view the answer history for each question to ensure that no issues slip through the cracks.
While a regular check-in helps managers to acknowledge good performance, recognition is the key to keeping good people. Recognition-based questions allow all employees posting updates to tag other members of the organisation to highlight their effort or accomplishments. This is really useful for maintaining cohesion in remote teams because it helps develop bonds of loyalty between everyone.
There are plenty of other uses for an effective feedback tool. But the simple fact remains that a lot of employees specifically want consistent feedback. But too many organisations are inconsistent. A recent study by XM Institute surveyed employers for their preferred points of feedback delivery.
By far, the most popular were after training and development (76%), after on-boarding (60%) and exit interviews (55%). Less than half collected feedback after major system changes or changes in HR policy. And even worse, less than 40% collected feedback during workflow. But if you want your employees to have a voice, don’t wait around to give it to them.
That’s pretty much our rundown of how implementing weekly check-ins can help reduce your staff turnover. But those aren’t the only ways that regular check-ins and feedback benefit employee engagement. Using check-ins and sentiment analysis today can give you the knowledge and insight to prepare your workplace culture for tomorrow.
Take the first step today! Download our free guide for additional resources and in-depth strategies to help you master employee engagement in a remote working world.
