How Employee Engagement Can Lower Employee Turnover

If you want to keep your employees happy, they have to be engaged. They have to love what they do, and they have to really enjoy coming to work.

As a manager, it’s important that you understand how much damage employee turnover causes, and how you can avoid it. It’s also important to note that it has a huge effect on the company’s bottom line.

Employee turnover is natural, and people naturally move on in their careers, and that’s perfectly normal. The real problem is when high employee turnover starts to become the norm.

I’ll share a few personal stories, as well as give some statistics on why reducing employee turnover is so important.

Finally, I’ll share very actionable ways that you can engage employees to keep retention high, and turnover low.

The Effects Of Employee Turnover

At the last company I worked at, you would think that there was a revolving door at the front entrance.

Employees would come in, spend about a month or two training, and learning how we work (while getting full access to our source code), and then were asked to leave because they weren’t producing “fast enough”.

Here are some tips to lower employee turnover.

This had a bunch of negative effects, but here are a few of them.

It lowered morale for everyone else there. There are so many people that don’t consider what kind of an effect an employee leaving or getting fired has on the rest of the team.

It creates a culture of fear, where no one knows how safe their job is. This obviously affects their work, because they spend so much time worrying about their livelihood.

At the time, I was in charge of hiring new software developers, and because I kept “failing” in the eyes of my manager, it lowered my morale.

I felt discouraged, and that I couldn’t get anything right. This is important for managers to understand, because I think (in my defense), that the expectations were set way too high.

Was I really that bad at hiring? Or were these developers not given enough of a chance to learn?

And finally, it’s annoying for a software developer to have to waste time training someone new, when they end up leaving a month or two later.

So of course the trainers became disengaged, and probably didn’t put in as much effort as more new employees would join.

Why Reducing Employee Turnover Is Important

The employee engagement numbers are just awful. So many people are unhappy with their jobs, and are disengaged.

Even people that are not considered “actively disengaged” are still not fully engaged.

They’re kind of just straddling the fence, and could go either way. Actually this type of person represents the biggest part of the group surveyed.

This is a great opportunity for employers to bring them over to the “actively engaged” side.

The truth is, it’s people that are the problem. By people, I mean managers. Not all managers are evil of course, but there are lots of them that for whatever reason (personal, political), want to see an engagement program fail.

PricewaterhouseCoopers says that 9 out of 10 barriers to the success of these types of programs are people related.

It’s fairly well known by now that most people don’t quit their jobs, they quit their bosses. This is so easy to change, all managers need to do is appreciate their employees. Be nice to them, respect them, treat them like they were your kids.

Even senior management seems not to get it. Again, not every company is doing wrong, but many CFO’s don’t understand that investing in your employees will provide a huge return on investment in the form of higher profits to the company.

I tried my best to go into detail about this in one of my recent posts. I gave many examples proving that having happy, engaged employees leads to higher profits.

Companies with highly engaged workers were able to lower employee turnover by 31%, according to research by Bersin.

It also costs a lot to replace an employee. Some estimates are as high as double the initial salary of the employee.

JDA, a professional services firm, went into detail about what it might cost to replace an employee, and their conclusion, while being a bit dramatic, illustrates a very scary point.

They say that for an employee with a $60,000/year salary, it would cost $150,000 to replace them.

I have a strange feeling that this year, it’s more important than ever to get this right.

There has been so much literature and so much change in the employee engagement space, that I think more and more people are starting to get it. Companies are finally realizing that employee satisfaction is simply not enough.

Employees need to be engaged to be able to perform well. As the economy struggles, many companies don’t have a choice, but to start really appreciating their employees to ensure that they’ll still be viable.

A few months ago, Bersin by Deloitte recently made their predictions for 2014, and said that 2014 is going to be the year of the employee.

Ways To Reduce Employee Turnover

I’ll give you 5 actionable ideas on what you can do, but put simply, it’s about respecting your employees and treating them how you’d expect to be treated.

1. Provide Regular Feedback – Employees crave feedback, so don’t be shy about giving it to them very frequently. In fact, 77% of employees are starved for recognition.


2. Collect Ideas – Show employees that you value their opinions and listen to them. Ask them to submit ideas that will help the company grow. This one is a win-win for the employer. They get great ideas, while also making employees feel good about themselves.


3. Invest In Them – Employees want to grow. Invest in their development, by offering to pay for courses that they take, and actively encourage them to learn more about the industry and their job. It will make them a better, smarter worker.


4. Team Building Activities – There are a lot of great team building activities for your office that you can do to bring everyone closer together, and to make sure that there is a social environment, where everyone gets along. Making employees feel connected to their coworkers is important for employee retention.


5. Surprise Them – Rewards often mean more when it’s a surprise. Randomly offer to take the team out for lunch. A friend of mine told me a story about how she bought popsicles for her entire team randomly one day and they had a “popsicle party” in their office.

Do You Think Employee Engagement Is The Key To Lowering Employee Turnover?

What do you think about employee turnover? Any other ideas? Let me know in the comments!

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