Five Top Tips on Retaining Your Staff in the UK

Ensuring your company has the best employees is an ongoing task with a lot of work. You need to manage your staff, reward current employees, and ensure that your employees correctly carry out their jobs. You, therefore, invest in your team. Accordingly, it makes sense to nurture their talents and retain good employees for as long as possible. This article will explain what you, as an employer, need to know about employee retention, giving you our five top tips for retaining staff.

Why Retain Staff?

When you retain your staff, you keep your team working for you. Accordingly, this means you have a low staff turnover rate.

You will likely want to retain your staff and avoid high staff turnover. Doing so helps you avoid the recruitment process, which can be resource-intensive for a business. Retaining staff also allows you to build up a team proficient in their roles and loyal to you as an employer. Therefore, you avoid losing those who know your business and have built up the skills needed over the years.

How to Retain Your Staff

There are many ways you, as an employer, can try to retain your staff. Below we present our top five tips for helping to maintain your staff.

1. Map Out Clear Career Paths

It is essential to make your staff realise that they can stay with you and still climb the career ladder. To do this, you should show them what could be ahead of them, such as: 

• salary increases;
• promotions; and 
• training opportunities.

You should speak to your staff to see how they wish to progress and what they aspire to become. Ensuring your staff can see clear room for progression will help them avoid feeling stuck in their careers. 

Remember that when you allow staff to see clear career progression, you should do so for all staff. Therefore, it is essential to act fairly without discriminating, as the latter is unlawful.

2. Create Challenging Work

When your staff have been in the same role for lengthy periods, they could get bored and want to move on if you provide them with the same work. Therefore, as their employer, you need to ensure that you stimulate them by providing tasks that change. You can do this by:

• giving them a new project to work on;
• increasing their responsibilities; or
• giving them a different role altogether in your business.

Remember to ensure that you provide your staff with any training necessary for the challenging work you allocate them. 

3. Offer Flexible Ways of Working

Offering flexible ways of working is an excellent way to help retain your staff. If your staff can manage their work pattern and methods better, they will likely be happier and want to remain in their roles. Try to tailor working methods to each employee. For example, you may like to offer a different workplace or varying shifts. 

Whilst offering flexible working may worry you in terms of associated costs, the costs of replacing staff are likely to outweigh them. In some circumstances, employers must legally consider flexible working requests. Thus, you could find yourself dealing with flexible working regardless.

Also, as an employer, you have a legal duty to ensure your staffs’ health, safety and well-being. Sometimes, flexible working may help the work-life balance and, therefore, your employees’ well-being. 

4. Be Fair

To help retain your staff, you should act fairly in your employment with them. When staff see or experience others receiving better treatment, it is off-putting and may cause them to want to leave your business. 

Acting fairly is part of your duty as an employer. Thus, it should be a way of working in which you already engage in.

5. Value and Appreciate Your Staff

It is essential to show appreciation to your staff. This will make them feel valued and help retain them. You should value and appreciate your staff regularly. Knowing that you are happy with their work, they may want to do more for you. Valuing and appreciating your team will gain respect from other staff and increase the likelihood of them wanting to remain with these people and therefore retain them in your business.

You should also listen to your team and ask for feedback. Encouraging your employees to talk about their work and the workplace can release stress. 

Key Takeaways

Retaining your staff is something you should be aiming for as an employer. If your team works well and is productive for your business, keeping them working for you makes sense. However, you must find ways to increase retention rather than assuming your staff will remain with you. For example, valuing and appreciating your team by letting them know you are happy with their work can be beneficial. Furthermore, consider offering flexible working arrangements which suit their lifestyle better, making them more comfortable at work.

If you need help understanding how to retain your staff, our experienced employment lawyers can assist as part of our LegalVision membership. For a low monthly fee, you will have unlimited access to lawyers to answer your questions and draft and review your documents for a low monthly fee. So call us today on 0808 196 8584 or visit our membership page.

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