How To: Make Employees Want to Stay at Your Company Forever

Hiring employees is only the beginning of creating a strong work place. In order to build on this strength, every company must learn how to retain employees. If you are constantly focused on employee turnover, you ultimately end up devoting less and less time to the more important aspects of your business. Moreover, the longer an employee stays in one position, the more productive and efficient the work they produce for you will be.

With this, we’ve put together several tips on how to make your employees want to stay at your company forever:

1. Conduct interviews based on why employees stay at your company.

• In addition to conducting interviews with the people who decide to leave your company, it’s just as important to find out why people stay. Asking these employees questions pertaining to: why they initially started working at your company? What makes them want to stay? What would cause them to leave? How they view your company’s leadership team? What would make your company even better for them? After conducting these interviews, look over your notes for common trends. What do people like and dislike most about your company? From here, you can take this information and use it to strengthen your employee retention strategy.

2. Provide employees with a clear path to promotion.

• In retaining employees, it becomes very important to provide a clear path to promotion. Without a direct goal in mind, employees can quickly become discouraged. Employees may begin to feel like the work they’re producing is meaningless to both their future and the company’s. Therefore, be sure to establish this path before the start of hiring.

3. Make sure your leadership team is involved.

• In order to hone in on employee development and foster open communication between managers and the employees working under them, make sure you dedicate time for them to work together. Train managers on how to coach employees to move forward to new positions, especially if they have demonstrated superior performance in their work. Moreover, teach them how to encourage employees who may not be performing so well.

4. Make sure your employees know what you expect of them.

• Many leaders make the mistake of assuming employees know what they expect of them. Yet, the truth is, every employer expects tasks to be completed a little differently from the next, and it shouldn’t be on the employee’s to figure this out. Therefore, it’s important to communicate your expectations clearly from day one. If your expectations happen to change, make sure to call a meeting and explain how and why they’ve changed right away.

5. Lastly, consistently communicate your company’s mission.

• Yes, you always have your company’s mission in the back if your mind. But, it’s important to remember that your employees don’t. The company mission is what ultimately keeps employees mentally and emotionally invested in their work. Therefore, it’s extremely important to communicate this mission to them on a consistent basis. For example, if a group of employees has been working on a big project that has met some hefty trials and tribulations over the past few weeks, take a moment to remind them of why they’re putting in all this hard work. Allow them to take a step back and look at the larger effect they’re having on the company.

For more information on making employees want to stay, check out the following resources:

• Stop Killing Employee Morale | 4 Ways to Boost Team Motivation Right Now

• How to Re-Engage Disengaged Employees

• Top 5 Employee Soft Skills & How to Help Employees Develop Them