Employee turnover doesn’t just hit your bottom line. It has a damaging effect on your company culture as well as your overall brand reputation. Many of the costs of employee turnover are hidden. When you add up lost knowledge and training costs - the loss of an employee is approximately 150 percent of their annual salary. High turnover can also be a signal that something isn’t quite working well – unmanageable workloads, poor management or a toxic corporate culture. And remember, employees who leave because they are dissatisfied spread the word out in the marketplace that your company is not a good place to work.

If you think that offering a generous compensation package will keep people from straying, think again. Money isn’t enough of a motivator for employees to stay at their job. In a Monster.com survey, employees (87%) rated an employer “that truly cares about the well-being of its employees,” as the top item on their job ‘wish-list.’

Below are three top tips to help reduce employee turnover and invest in your workforce.

Be more flexible
Whether you have employees who could benefit from working a few days from home, or from a unique work schedule, it’s important to look for opportunities to offer flexibility where you can. Today, candidates look for work/life balance as much as they look for an increase in salary. Creating a flexible environment increases morale, boosts engagement and often allows employees to do their best work, when they want to, where they want to. Flexibility is a huge perk that employees would think twice about giving up.

Offer challenging and rewarding career paths
When an employee feels like they’ve learned all they need to know, or that they are stuck in a position, they start to look elsewhere for opportunity. Challenging your employees to grow and providing them avenues to do so is vital if you want to keep your employees beyond the two year mark. Look further than offering linear promotions. Give your employees the opportunity to job swap to try out different functions within the company. Consider offering secondments or job shares.

Hire the right people from the start

The most important way to retain good employees is to hire the right people from the start. Make sure that you are clear about expectations during the interview process and be open about the company culture, opportunities for growth as well as challenges the company is facing. When you hire right and the candidate is a good fit, you decrease the chance that they will want to leave. Plus, an employee who is a bad fit has a negative impact on the culture of your company.

There are a number of different ways that you can reduce turnover at your company, but most importantly, you have to be committed to investing in your workforce. Managers often underestimate how important a positive, flexible and rewarding work environment is to retaining employees. Increasing employee retention is an ongoing commitment that involves treating employees as the most important asset that your company has – talent. Top talent is a major competitive differentiator in today’s marketplace, and it’s payback is big for the companies that get it right.

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