Reducing the turnover of Employees

When you are growing your small business the one thing that you fear hearing from your employees is that they are going to be leaving for a different job. For small businesses employee turnover is a nightmare because of how hard it is to find the right employees for the job. However, 94% of turnover is preventable. The other 6% of the turnovers, which is also referred to as your natural turnover rate, is due to retirement, spousal relocation or unavoidable, life-changing events.

However, when it comes to keeping employee turnover low small businesses have many advantages over larger businesses. The main reason for this is that when you work in a small company, one that has less than 100 employees, all of the employees are engaged and challenged because they do a variety of different things rather than just one small thing in a company of hundreds of people. Not to mention that it is easier to communicate with people in a smaller company because everybody works so closely together. However, working in a small business can also have its downsides because employees might feel that they are lacking a career path and that they are only receiving limited benefits. If these problems are not addressed it can lead to high rates of turnover in your small business.

Here are some tips that you can follow to help reduce your turnover in your small business.

Tip one:
Start asking your current employees questions. This is important because they only way you are going to know if their needs are being met are if you ask them questions. Most employers are afraid to do this because they are afraid of what they will find out. However, when they face losing a valuable employee they often wish they had discovered that there was a problem sooner. If you do not ask your employees how they feel about their jobs ensures that there is nothing that you can do about it and it actually increases the chances that your employees will leave. Here are the three key questions you need to ask your employees to see what you can do differently to ensure that they stay:

• What do you like about working here?


• Is there anything that is keeping you from being more successful?


• If you ran this company, what would you do differently?

Tip two:
Employees want to be able to grow inside of a company, even if they do not change positions they still want to learn new skills because that is an important part of their growth. The great thing about developing new skills is that the continuous learning not only benefits your employees, it also benefits your employees. The reason that it benefits your small business is because your employees can use their new skills to improve your small business and make it more successful. If they contribute like that to your small business it also tends to make them more loyal to your company. When it comes to offering your employees new skills you do not need to just limit them to work related skills, you can find out what they are interested in and offer to pay for a portion or all of those classes.

Tip three:
Something else that you can do is to celebrate more. You don't have to throw huge parties, but letting your employees know when they have succeed beyond what is expected or just celebrating when things go great for the business is a way to show employees that you care about their success. When things go wrong rather than ignore the problem or yell and scream at your employees talk to them about what you can do differently next time to make it a success. Also ask your employees for any ideas on what they could have done differently.