How Leaders Can Retain Their Team

High employee turnover poses several risks to a business or company. This can result in disruption of routines, decreased productivity, and a decline in team morale leading to resignations. Retaining talented employees requires more than just offering higher salaries and benefits.

Employees are looking for a business or company that is more aligned with their focus, namely one that can support mental health, well-being and culture. Even though many companies offer different remuneration and benefits, there are still many that fall short of targets and fail to retain employees.

The problem lies in the mismatch between priority values ​​for employees and the company's perception of employee priorities. McKinsey studies show that companies believe lack of compensation, work-life balance, and poor mental health are the biggest factors leading to resignations. However, the reality is that companies do not consider their employees as important.

The goal of employee retention cannot be limited to improvement alone. Structural and cultural changes must also start by discussing two core priorities, namely a lack of value and a sense of belonging.

What Can Leaders Do?

A team is not only a responsibility for a company, but also for the leaders within the team themselves. A leader needs to have the skills to progress beyond a results-based approach to a more holistic socio-cultural approach by applying the following steps:

Make People Feel Valued

Remuneration is still a significant motivator for employees, they want to know that they are valued as people more than just cogs in a company machine.

Show your team that leaders and the company care about their lives, careers, and well-being. This can be demonstrated by development and learning, clear career progression, and measures of work-life balance.

Investing in employee development not only provides clear career advancement, but can also show employees that the company cares about their career growth and is thinking about maintaining long-term relationships.

Show your company cares about the mental health and well-being of employees, and that there are steps that need to be taken to maintain work-life balance. Some actions include offering:

• Health day (wellness day)
• Flexible hours
• Establish communication expectations outside of work hours
• Encourage the principle of autonomy

Investing in employee mental health is not only an obligation and responsibility of the employer, but can also bring financial benefits to the company. Any funds spent on successful mental health programs will return more than twice the average spent.

The biggest challenge for companies is trying to build the right culture and environment. After that, note the possibility of adopting these measures. Company leaders have an important responsibility to analyze and evaluate whether they can build a more positive environment and have value for the team.

Building a Sense of Belonging

In the work environment, cultivating a sense of belonging can make employees more confident in their work and can increase performance by up to 56% based on the Better Up report, The Value of Belonging at Work: Investing in Workplace Inclusion.

Initiatives targeted at building ownership have often traditionally been brick-and-mortar, but in recent years there has been a shift towards remote or virtual working.

The existence of a remote work system encourages companies to look for new ways to stay connected with employees in order to build a sense of belonging to the company. Some examples of initiatives that can be implemented virtually include:

• Introducing a community led by fellow employees
• Implement new collaborative technologies
• Invite input with two-way evaluation and system implementation
• Introduce benefits with inclusive targets

Inclusively targeted benefits, such as additional childcare allowance, can let employees know they are in the know and can increase feelings of inclusion in the company environment. Apart from that, utilizing new platforms such as Discord as a discussion and chat room by utilizing a smooth channel system, can create a better sense of 'togetherness' and virtual collaboration in teams working remotely. Through increasingly easy-to-use tools and technology, it can help reduce communication, relationship and cultural barriers in remote teams.

A true commitment to building a sense of belonging must be embedded in company practices and culture. One of the best ways to evaluate organizational practices and culture is to apply the DEIB framework. DEIB is an acronym for diversity, equality, inclusion and belonging.

Caring for Employees

Caring for your employees is not a revolutionary concept, but with life becoming increasingly fast, growing and complex, companies also need to adapt to existing changes in order to care for their employees.

Social responsibility is no longer just an additional focus, but needs to be the main focus for companies to maintain healthy employees and teams. This will then lead to the security and success of a business or company.

Not all employees have flexible working hours and exclusive benefits. While this can trigger positive things for employees and the company, the most important thing is the feeling of being valued as a human being. Therefore, companies have a role in helping to make this happen for the sake of positive development for each individual, society, the work environment, and for the company itself.