January 22 Newsletter

10 strategies to reduce employee turnover

You may be the heart and soul of your business but your employees are the blood and life force! If you’re having trouble retaining good employees (which is actually one of the biggest issues that most businesses face), it’s time to think about how you can keep your top-performers happy. Here are 10 ways to reduce employee turnover.

1. Study your employee turnover – why have employees left in the past year or two? Focus particularly on your key employees, the ones who cost you the most when they left. Is there anything you can do differently or improve on to prevent this in the future? Always perform exit interviews to give you some insight into this.
2. Get serious with your recruitment – hiring the wrong people is the biggest cause of high turnover. Most business owners recruit based on skills and qualifications only but recruitment should be much more than that. You should hire people based on their behavioural and cultural fit as well.
3. Improve your onboarding – the first few weeks and months are crucial to retaining good talent. Over the first 90 days, focus on how you can improve this experience and create a solid process. Consider giving a welcome pack with essential information and implement a mentor system so that an experienced employee can support them and help them learn the ropes.
4. Offer competitive salaries and total compensation – pay and benefits are among the top reasons that people take jobs and show up for work every day. It’s a serious motivator so you need to be offering appropriate salaries and benefits as a minimum. 
5. Offer flexible schedules and telecommuting options – flexibility has become a lot more important since the pandemic as we are all looking to improve our work-life balance. See if you can offer working remotely for some of the week or permanently as well as flexible hours. 
6. Closely monitor toxic employees – if you have any employees that are overly critical, who gossip or blame others, and who are not team players, keep an eye on them. These types of employees can push other high achievers out of your business so try to address any problems before it’s too late.
7. Promote work-life balance – prevent burnout and increase satisfaction by encouraging work-life balance. You can do this through flexible scheduling, remote working, giving employees time off when they need it the most, and leading by example yourself.
8. Reward and recognise achievements – positive reinforcement is powerful so encourage and recognise excellence. When employees do something right or exhibit behaviours that you want to nurture, show your appreciation. 
9. Pay attention to employee engagement – you can improve retention by identifying when an employee is disengaging and making efforts to help them get out of this funk. Think about how you can meet the social and emotional needs of your employees. Discuss this with them.
10. Improve communication and offer regular feedback – communication and collaboration are essential to make sure that the whole team is happy and productive. As well as using practice management systems, consider having regular 1:2:1s and performance reviews to give feedback and set individual goals. Infrequent performance reviews is actually a big reason that employees leave as they don’t feel inspired or motivated to improve. 

Extra help for businesses

On 21st December the UK chancellor announced some extra funding for businesses hit badly by the surge in Covid-19 cases.

Hospitality and leisure businesses

Can apply for cash grants of up to £6,000 per premises.  These will be administered by local councils.

Other struggling businesses

Outside of hospitality and leisure, other struggling businesses can apply to local councils for a different grant under the Additional Restrictions Grant, which has been topped up with £102m. 

The Statutory Sick Pay Rebate Scheme

This scheme is coming back.  Businesses with fewer than 250 employees can claim money to cover sick pay for employees who are affected by Covid.

Culture Recovery Fund

An extra £30m is being put aside for arts organisations through the existing Culture Recovery Fund.

Please keep up to date with the latest guidance here .

Integrates with Xero

The Xero integration means that we focus on making sure Xero is up to date before we can produce the reports.

Visual reports

Spotlight enables us to create graphs and charts which allows business owners to see and understand how their business is performing easier.

Dashboards

Spotlight can produce one page dashboards containing up to 6 charts to give a snapshot to aid with decision making

Decision Making

It's hard to make any decisions without knowing the numbers, Spotlight allows us to share the numbers on a regular basis and comparing back to the budgets to see how well your business is performing.

Team News

This newsletter sees the beginning of a new year.  We are incredibly happy and excited about the new opportunities and relationships that we will build this year, as well as developing relationships with our existing clients and helping them to thrive in 2022.

Wishing you a Happy New Year,

Katherine, David, Ben and Michelle