The years since the Covid pandemic have seen millions of workers from multiple sectors around the world join a mass exodus from the workplace. This ‘Great Resignation’ has been noted in a wide range of sources and industry experts predict that it will only continue. In this context, staff retention is more important than ever. Workers are at the heart of every business – and no business can survive without its workers.
Here, we’ll explore how employee training and development can help your business improve staff retention. We’ll look at staff retention in general, zooming in particularly on the healthcare sector, outlining staff retention strategies and showing how Feaniks can help your business retain the staff you need to thrive.
Why staff retention is important
Staff retention is crucial to helping your business succeed in the long term.
Keeping hold of your workers can provide benefits including:
- Cost savings
- Institutional knowledge and continuity
- Higher morale and engagement
First, retaining staff cuts down the amount of money that you need to spend on recruiting, onboarding and training new staff.
Second, staff retention lets your business benefit from the knowledge and experience that your employees gain while on the job. They learn about the sector, find new and improved ways to do their jobs and forge relations with individuals and fellow workers. When you have high turnover, you lose all these benefits.
Finally, workers are more engaged when they can see and grasp opportunities for growth and development. Employees stay longer at companies that they’re happy to work at. The other side of this coin is, of course, that companies with higher staff retention tend to have happier workforces which positively impact the customer experience.
All of these benefits will help you reduce costs, improve processes and productivity – and ultimately stay ahead of your competitors.
How to retain staff
It’s absolutely crucial, then, that your business takes steps to improve staff retention.
Below, we’ll outline some staff retention strategies to help you build a happy, engaged workforce that’s with you for the long haul.
Staff retention strategies – how to improve staff retention
- Ensure high-quality training and development
One of the best ways to improve staff retention at your business is to ensure that you’re giving your workers opportunities to upskill.
Training and development programmes help keep employees engaged. Good training ensures that your workers can do their job to the best of their ability, reducing stress and improving productivity. On top of this, taking an active role in your employees’ career development shows them that working for you is good for their careers – that they’ll be able to grow and advance within your business.
Implementing clear career paths, mentorship programmes and promotion opportunities demonstrate a commitment to your employees’ progression that they will thank you for.
For best results, ensure you’re training individual workers in ways that work for them. Adopt collaborative and cooperative strategies to keep them actively involved in their learning, and ensure engagement and buy-in from managers.
- Promote healthy work-life balance
Letting your employees burnout is a sure-fire way to encourage them to look for different job opportunities elsewhere. Promoting a healthy work-life balance, on the other hand, contributes to wellbeing, job satisfaction and, of course, staff retention.
While a healthy work-life balance will look different for different individuals in different sectors, there are some things that will always help employees feel valued
Your organisation should make sure to provide things like:
- Flexible and remote working arrangements
- Family-friendly approaches to hours worked, leave and more
- Access to health and wellbeing support, including for mental health
On top of this, listen to your workers: give them ways to provide feedback and make suggestions and listen to and respond to what they say.
- Provide competitive compensation, rewards and recognition
Finally, one of the most important things to keep in mind when it comes to staff retention is compensation. Make sure you’re paying your workers what they’re worth. If you don’t, they will be far more likely to look for another company that will.
In addition to salary and benefits packages, you should also make sure to recognise employees’ achievements and reward them for exceptional performance. This will not only encourage them to stay with your business – it will also help incentivise them to do better work while they’re with you. This doesn’t always come at a cost; other forms of recognition can be important and valid to your workforce.
How to retain staff in healthcare
As we noted above, how best to retain your staff will be different in different sectors. Businesses in the healthcare sector can find staff retention particularly difficult.
Factors making staff retention in healthcare difficult include:
- High barriers to entry in terms of qualifications and experience
- Ever-increasing competition for skilled professionals
- The need to work often unsociable hours
- Work that is often emotionally, physically and intellectually demanding
Despite these hurdles – there are many things you can do to help your business retain staff in the healthcare sector.
Staff retention strategies in healthcare
- Provide specialised, ongoing training, professional development and support
Workers in the healthcare sector are committed to their industry. They have often been through a lot of training just to get to their current position.
One of the best ways to improve staff retention in healthcare, then, is to make your workplace somewhere that your employees can continue their learning. Provide specialised training to suit each worker’s position and goals, and work with them to develop and work towards career progression goals.
- Help your workers manage their workloads
Workload management can be particularly difficult in the healthcare sector. But it’s not impossible. And there are ways to help make things easier on your staff and to preserve their work-life balance.
Make sure to be realistic in your scheduling, to give workers plenty of opportunities to let you know if they need to adjust their workload, and to provide access to resources to support your employees if they begin to feel worn down or burnt out.
- Create an inclusive, mutually supportive culture
Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when considering staff retention in an often high-pressure industry is to create a workplace culture that lets employees feel heard and respected.
This is especially important as it underlies the other healthcare staff retention strategies we’ve outlined above. If your workers don’t feel like they can raise issues when they arise, then you won’t be able to help them manage their workloads or progress in their careers.
Improving staff retention with Feaniks
At Feaniks we specialise in providing effective e-learning and training programmes to professionals at affordable rates, to help your business empower managers and upskill workers.
- Our curricula provide a framework for managers to test competencies, gain feedback, assess shortfalls and discuss common issues. This better equips management to lead, and helps to create a workforce that is more skilled, more motivated and incentivised to stay.
- With access to in-depth data, you can identify what’s working and what’s not, and adjust your training and development programmes as you go.
- Our collaborative approach to learning helps to forge open and honest relationships among employees and between workers and management. This helps to nurture a healthy workplace culture, and make your company the sort of place that workers want to stay at.
Staff retention can be difficult. But figuring out how to retain staff is one of the best ways to help your business thrive. By investing in training and development opportunities, you can foster learning and engagement, and ultimately help workers stay invested in your business.
If you’d like to learn more about how Feaniks can help you improve staff retention, please explore our site.