Maintaining a payroll and keeping the cost of recruitment under control is an ongoing issue for most SMEs. While finding good staff is important, retaining them is even more so. It avoids unnecessary business disruption with staff turnover and improves morale when employees see opportunities to build a career (and not just have a job) with the company.
Here are some ways that SMEs can boost staff retention.
Offer an Attractive Benefits Package
Offering a benefits package that incentivizes potential employees to come on-board and others to remain with the company is seen as part of their total remuneration package. Every company is different, with decision-makers seeing value in specific incentives and not in other types of benefits. It’s also possible that high-level employees may negotiate a very specific benefits package that’s unique to them. All of these aspects make managing benefits correctly across a diverse workforce a challenge for any human resources department.
Under these circumstances, it’s necessary to have a dynamic software solution that can handle ad hoc benefit planning along with standard plans that are issued to employees in certain departments or levels within the company. The software made available from Apprize Technology is designed to provide a robust solution that can meet the needs of enterprise clients. Their software is intended to reduce the difficulty of selecting the best providers of benefits and managing a variety of packages as a workforce grows.
Loyalty Bonuses Based on Longevity
A loyalty bonus based on the number of years of service is not something that every employer offers. To be effective, it should be something that increases annually based on how long the employee has been with the company (and any related subsidiaries).
The idea behind it is to focus not just on promotion but on loyal people who stay with the company through good times and not so good ones. Not every person moves up progressively in the business – it depends on high positions either opening up or being created. Other employees are content to stay where they are. Either way, getting a little something extra for not job hopping is always appreciated.
Understand the Link Between Promoting from Within & Staff Training
For SMEs, staff retention is important because employees take their knowledge elsewhere and then it’s lost to the company. The cost of recruitment puts a considerable strain on smaller businesses when keeping staff onboard once they’re in-house make more sense than paying higher recruitment expenses to find their replacement.
In order to keep staff motivated, it’s necessary to be active in promoting from within, even if this requires more training compared to recruiting externally. This is worth it because other employees observe that the company is providing opportunities to move up; they’re more likely to stick around vs finding a new job at another company to get an indirect promotion.
Managing staff effectively is not unlike a complex puzzle that you can never solve. It’s full of many moving pieces, different emotions, and motivations. However, when making the effort to provide a reasonable set of benefits and promotional opportunities, it can cut through to what truly matters. Employees are then more likely to stay because they’re incentivized to do so.
