At HRwisdom we share a lot of excellent free staff management information and resources. 

Some of these free resources include:

• HRwisdom Employee Attraction & Retention Guide
• How To Motivate Staff [Video]
• Free E-Learning For Employers
• Webinar on The 7 Things That Set High-Performing Organisations Apart
• Good Interview Questions & Answers

We also share a very comprehensive Coaching Toolkit which contains over 50 pages of information and templates that any manager can use to run coaching sessions with their staff.

These resources can help you in areas such as:

• Talent Management
• Recruitment & Selection
• Onboarding
• Engagement
• Development

In our earlier post (Employee Turnover – Time To Take It More Seriously?), we looked at some crucial reasons on why you should make retention a priority even in the time of economic downturn and hopefully, you are convinced by now.

In today’s post, HRwisdom goes a step further and shares with you a few employee turnover practical tips we found offered by Laura Kerekes to help with your employee retention.

Things You Can Do To Help Keep Your Best Employees

The following are two management practices that Laura suggests you follow to help retain key staff.

1. Be clear about your expectations and policies – then follow them. Inconsistency is a killer for employee satisfaction. Poor management practices like unclear rules and expectations and inconsistent application of established rules and policies have huge negative impact on employee satisfaction.

Check out the free HRwisdom Employee Attraction and Retention Guide.

These inconsistencies and mistakes leave employees with a sense of insecurity and make them wonder if the organisation they work at has a solid foundation. Also, on a side note, inconsistency is one of the various reasons why employees join or actively petition to form a union.

2. Communicate and show respect. Clear and open communication between management and staff is always the key strategy to retain your staff. Keep your employees informed about what is going on with business. You also need to actively seek their input and provide channels where they can voice their opinions.

There are new web survey sites and apps appearing all the time that can make it easy for you to get staff input and involvement into decision making. For instance, check out Vetter.

Showing respect to your staff is another key strategy. Avoid gossiping at all times (it’s ok – having discussions with other managers to improve a subordinate’s performance is not gossip). Nothing erodes trust and respect more than talking about someone behind their back. Your credibility as a leader vanishes when you talk about an employee’s faults openly with another person – your listener may wonder what you’re busy saying about them behind their back when they’re out of the room.

In contrast, a great way to show your respect to your staff is to follow up on their complaints, questions and concerns with genuine care. Don’t ignore them or treat their concerns as irrelevant.

Making an effort will definitely be noticed and appreciated.

The tips offer here make good business sense. By applying them in your business, you will surely begin making your organisation a great place to work where your best team members won’t want to leave.

To find out other retention tips, Laura’s full article here.

Free Employee Attraction and Retention Guide

While you’re here, feel free to check out the free HRwisdom Employee Attraction and Retention Guide – it is an excellent resource for any business.

In the comprehensive free guide, top management practitioners offer you their best employee attraction & retention advice.

Click here to download the Employee Attraction and Retention Guide.

With an unstable global economy, people become more cautious when considering the option of changing jobs. So, you may think that keeping your staff is a relatively easy task. Even if they leave, it should be fairly easy to replace them.

However, when the economy eventually recovers to full health, you may have inadvertently put your organisation in a bad position if you only deal with turnover at that time – ie. you could be shutting the gate once the horse has bolted.

Check out the free HRwisdom Employee Attraction and Retention Guide.

If you are still not sure about the importance of keeping the turnover rate low, then these excellent prompts we found by Suzanne Lucas may give you some further food for thought.

Reasons To Keep Staff Turnover Rate Low

The following suggestions were prompted by Suzanne’s insights about the issue of turnover and why every business should continue to take it seriously.

If you don’t have time to train and develop now, do you think you will have the time in the future? You may think that people with the good academic qualification and qualified skills are the best employees for the job. However, it is usually those who fit in the culture of the organisation and has good learning skills that are most valuable for your organisation. But it takes time and money to train these people up for the job.

If you’re not focused on developing and growing your staff now, you won’t have time to do it when they have the chance to work somewhere else once the economy is running at full speed.

A bad economy means only the best can afford to leave. A bad economy doesn’t mean that organisations aren’t hiring, what it means is that they will only hire the best. Hence, if you’re not working hard to keep your employees, your best ones will find new jobs and leave.

The best way to find good candidates is through networking. When you hire, you’ll start by asking your current employees for referrals. You’ll only get good referrals if they feel it’s a great place to work. Think about the ‘BBQ effect’ – who would stand around at a BBQ at suggest to their friends that they should join their workplace if it’s a place that they don’t like?

If you want to make sure you have some good future candidates in your recruitment pipeline, you’ll need to keeping working on keeping your staff engaged and motivated.

If you are not putting in the effort to keep your best employees, you may find yourself in quite a predicament when the day comes that they start to walk out the door.

To find out more of Suzanne’s HR ideas, visit her website here.

Free Employee Attraction and Retention Guide

While you’re here, feel free to check out the free HRwisdom Employee Attraction and Retention Guide – it is an excellent resource for any business.

In the comprehensive free guide, top management practitioners offer you their best employee attraction & retention advice.

Click here to download the Employee Attraction and Retention Guide.

If you are in a business that wants to find and attract high quality people who may be at risk of choosing to go to your competitor – you need to consider the impact of your employer branding.

Today we’re sharing an interesting slideshare presentation which lists 27 best practice insights to help you with your employer branding.

Presentation On Employer Branding

Below is the Kelly Group’s presentation The Insider’s Guide To Employer Branding – 27 Employer Branding Best Practice Insights.

The presentation was built after a group of employer branding experts were brought together in one room and asked to come up with clear advice for other businesses. This group opened up and revealed their previous successes, mistakes and suggestions for the future.

Here’s how the report summarises the situation:

The employer brand has become fluid, responsive and an ever-changing conversation between organisations, employees, candidates, and the media. The new age of employer branding has created additional challenges and opportunities for HR and Marketing staff, as well as for leadership teams that want and need the best talent for their businesses. By understanding the current environment and trends in employer branding, HR, Marketing and leadership teams can learn to adapt their strategies to influence rather than control, and to guide rather than dictate.

If evolution is the only successful strategy, employer branding will continue to evolve, and it’s only just beginning.

If you think your colleagues would could benefit from some of these employer branding tips, share this presentation with them now.

No one likes terminating staff. It is an outcome that employees hate to face and it’s an action that many employers hesitate to take.

Would you move to employee termination on the basis of abusing social media, taking frequent breaks, or missing too many days of work? They are probably not serious issues if they only happen once or twice but they deserve your attention if they occur on a regular basis.

The big question is then how do you draw the line between giving your staff member a well deserved second chance verse getting them out of your organisation?

There is no easy answer but today HRwisdom shares with you some insights from Toddi Gutner, an award-winning journalist, writer and editor, about what actions you may take to keep the performance of your staff on track as well as help you to make a more informed decision of whether you should terminate a specific staff.

Click to get access to employment termination documents.

Drawing the line

Set expectations up front: You need to have clear policies and procedures about what employees can and cannot do. Specificity is the key. Argument occurs when you provide ways for ambiguity and questioning. Also, employees should be informed about exactly what is expected of them. This means that you want to focus on performance with quantifiable goals. With clear expectation, your employees perform better and you also have a better sense of where your staff are up to.

Hold employees accountable: once an employee knows the rules and is given fair warning, he or she must be held accountable. For example, if you have a policy that allows a maximum of four unexplained absences. You need to discuss with them about the issue the first time instead of the fourth time. This sends a clear message that you know they’re not at work — you care about them but that you need them to get the job done.

These actions can help you manage your employees’ performance as well as giving you a better idea of when termination should be considered.

To read the full article, go here.

Click to get access to employment termination documents.