Popular Perks to Boost Employee Retention

Employee retention is a vital statistic to the longevity of your business. This fact is superficially understood by many managers, but not given the attention it deserves when it comes to action. Employee churn, or the rate at which your staff turns over, indicates structural issues with a business and its culture, and can result in a poorly-skilled staff cohort, shaky market position and even a lighter bank account. What can be done to improve staff retention, and hence the strength of your business?

Remote Work

The remote work revolution is nothing new, having taken off properly at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. With the resulting arms race amongst tech companies competing to develop and iterate remote collaboration tools, at-home working became much more viable for businesses in an extremely short timescale – and today is easier than ever for businesses to implement.

There has been some pushback on remote working recently, with concerns being raised about productivity and worker cohesion, but these concerns have been all-but quashed by research outcomes. As such, the benefits of implementing remote work opportunities for employees – increased self-management, reduced living costs and personal comfort amongst many others – vastly outweigh the prospective demerits.

Training and Development

One of the most important aspects of an employee’s journey with a given business is their career development. It is a driving factor in a majority of workers’ decisions regarding their roles, alongside and even over other factors such as company culture or starting salary. Offering robust training and development, enabling employees to upskill themselves within the business, is a positive step towards demonstrating investment in an employee’s career, and will reduce the likelihood of targeted employees considering roles elsewhere.

Health and Wellbeing

A new way to incentivise staff longevity has emerged over the past decade, and is in direct correlation with the decline of public services under the UK’s current government. As NHS services continue to struggle, and waiting lists continue to plague those seeking health answers, private health insurance is becoming more crucial. Offering any form of health or wellbeing assistance as a perk of the job, from health insurance to paid-for counselling sessions, can be instrumental in improving morale, hence creating a happier, resilient staff cohort.

Other Perks

The above suggestions are but a hand-picked few amidst a field of opportunities to improve your employees’ relationship with your company, and to reduce the churn rate for your cohort as a whole. There are myriad little ways in which you can reinforce this culture, too; for instance, by offering to cover temporary car insurance for employees in the event that an emergency dictates they need it, or by keeping the office regularly stocked with healthy snacks to keep workers fed and motivated.

As long as you are operating in line with a positive and forward-thinking company culture, you will be on the right path to minimising the painful impacts of high staff churn. In turn, your business will flourish.