2 Surefire Ways to Decrease Employee Turnover

When new hires don’t hang around long enough to justify the time, resources, and money put into hiring and onboarding them, it’s both frustrating and expensive for the company they leave. To make matters even worse, having a high level of employee turnover company-wide is associated with decreased customer satisfaction, productivity and profitability. Prioritizing initiatives to decrease employee turnover helps HR and the company.

How can you decrease employee turnover rates?

1. Keep employees happy.

Make sure your new hires are happy. Research has shown that job satisfaction is a key predictor of employee turnover. We can point you to a hundred studies that suggest paying employees fairly helps with that – but actually, compensation is not the leading predictor of job satisfaction. The nature of the job itself is most important. Employees rank work they found interesting as being more important than their compensation.

Also, to decrease employee turnover, monitor relationships between supervisors and coworkers, and the overall climate of the company. Be on the lookout for toxic leaders and other factors that may degrade the interpersonal component of the workplace. Multiple research studies find that team-building programs help employees better understand their role in a company and increase employee happiness and job satisfaction, especially for larger teams.

2. Avoid chronic job-jumpers.

In 1974, an industrial psychologist identified a category of workers, which he referred to as “hobos”, known for their pattern of chronically changing jobs, and even dropping out of the labor market voluntarily. More recent research has linked this worker type to a higher level of creativity. Although creativity can be an asset in some roles, more creative people also tend to be more adaptable to change. It can also make them more comfortable and even desirous of change, including changing their workplace entirely. Which may be counteracting your initiatives to decrease employee turnover.

Other personality research has found that the less conscientious and less agreeable someone is, the more likely they are to quit a job in general, regardless of the job itself. As a bonus, higher conscientiousness is predictive of many beneficial workplace behaviors, such as “gritty” persistence when facing adversity. Also, individuals higher in agreeableness tend to be friendly and cooperative, thus maintaining a positive interpersonal climate.

In summary, there are two angles to tackle to decrease employee turnover:

1. The work environment needs to be good (fair pay, positive climate).
2. The employees should have personalities compatible with staying put.

How do you do this?

Cangrade has hiring and talent management solutions that can you decrease employee turnover today.

1. Our pre-hire assessment uses psychological research and bias-free AI to identify candidates with the best potential fit.
2. Our retention forecast predicts how likely a candidate is to stay in their role and delivers you insights into your current employees’ level of engagement.