Today’s employees need to feel engaged in their work. When engagement stops, employees hit a plateau and start looking for other opportunities. Therefore, employers should pursue a proactive approach in order to encourage employee retention and growth.
- Prioritize Personal Development: By demonstrating to employees that their personal development is a company priority, you will show them you are supporting them. That increases loyalty. The easiest way to do this is to ensure managers are engaging in one-on-one meetings with their team members on a regular basis. These meetings should specifically address interests outside their current roles to encourage them to spread their wings. You can then provide support to help them succeed.
- Create an Industry Club: A sense of community creates a mentoring group among peers. Staff can be offered monthly or weekly lunch-and-learns where new ideas can be discussed, and industry trends can be followed. This not only adds to your company’s expertise but also allows employees to share new skills.
- Create a Mentoring Culture: Both managers and peers can provide valuable training through mentorship. Managers are in a better position to provide hands-on mentoring as they can help facilitate an employee’s goals. However, peers are excellent mentoring candidates especially when you bring on new hires.
- By pairing up new employees with those who have discovered a successful career within your organization, you encourage team building in hand with invaluable training. Peer learning also encourages people to discuss similar challenges and overcome issues together. Cross-departmental training also works well. By having someone in marketing spend time in sales and vice versa, they will see why certain processes are in place as well as come up with new solutions that might help the two departments work better together.
- Encourage Suggestions: With an open-door policy and face-to-face conversations, employees will feel valued when their ideas are considered. Employees doing the job often know where improvements can be made. By allowing them to provide input into how workflow can be optimized, you can make worthwhile improvements and employees feel valued. Input can be operations based but can also include suggestions to create a more desirable work environment or company culture. With a goal to be continuously improving, employees will also feel the desire for self-improvement and growth.
Offering a growth-focused culture develops strong ties between the company and employees and can increase retention while enhancing development to avoid skills gaps!
