Have a new hire in your department? Within 45 days, that employee will either become a raving fan of your organization or resign. Regrettably, a significant percentage of newly minted workers choose the latter. You can avoid this issue and retain as many great people as possible if you improve your managerial skills.
Make no mistake: The manager-employee relationship is a massive predictor of whether a fresh employee will stay or go. According to a GoodHire survey, 82% of workers agreed they would quit a job because of a bad manager or boss-related friction. And if you start leaking talented professionals, you’ll not only experience a gut punch to your team morale, but you’ll cost your organization plenty. After all, it takes upwards of 120 days to source, recruit and onboard someone. That’s expensive.
Fortunately, it’s possible to avoid saying goodbye to good team members. You just have to implement new employee retention strategies to reduce 90-day attrition.
How to keep employees from leaving
To reduce new hire turnover and become the most effective, welcoming and supportive manager possible, try putting these tactics in place:
1. Understand what makes each employee tick.
When you create a team dynamic that allows people to bring in diversity of thought and the unique experiences of their backgrounds, you’ll create a strong foundation of belonging that encourages new hire retention.
You can build this sense of belonging by leveraging the power of psychometric-based assessments. Maybe you’ll find out you have a real go-getter on your hands. You’ll want to be very direct, tell them where they stand and what they need to do, and then get out of the way. Meeting each employee where they are will go a long way toward fostering the trust and belonging you need to execute your vision for the team.
2. Make ‘thinking outside the box’ fun.
As a team leader, you must understand and manage a variety of work styles. That way, you can maximize individual and collective decision-making by leaning into each person’s native work style.
You can uncover your team’s work styles with a brainstorming session practice where employees assume different thinking hats. In this example, one employee is tasked with developing new ideas and is encouraged to bring unpredictable or possibly outlandish ideas to a meeting. Another employee’s role is to be more discerning by assessing the risks of different ideas.
By assigning your team members a specific work style “hat,” you can bust through “group think” and show that every work style is a strength in every situation. In time, you can also help your employees expand their abilities by asking them to tackle different work style roles so they can expand their repertoire of abilities.
3. Toss out the cookie-cutting training.
The old “one-size-fits-all” training approach doesn’t cut it. The good news is that delivering individualized, continuous training doesn’t take much time, particularly when you leverage AI.
Let’s say you have a new hire that needs to email the head of sales, John, every week. The problem is they hardly know John and have no idea how John likes to consume information. With an AI training tool that uses previously recorded psychometric data to offer pre-supplemented suggestions, your employee can be sure he is writing effective emails that are comprehensive and valuable for John.
This AI-fueled approach to “on-the-fly” training can extend beyond emails to all communications, ultimately helping new employees make their contributions more meaningful from the start. When you support your new hires like this with personalized, real-time training, you’re setting them up for immediate success.
Regardless of scary employee turnover stats, you can beat back worker churn as long as you leverage new employee retention strategies. You can also grow positive manager-employee relationships that will encourage productivity, collaboration and innovation well into the future.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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