We have put together a list of 6 ideas that will help you improve the retention rates of your employees

Increase your employee’s Annual leave:

This may sound like a very unproductive method to increase retention rates, but do it right and it will work wonders for your organization.Increasing your employee’s annual leave may sound scary, but you don’t need to increase it by a lot.

Just adding a leave before christmas and one more holiday on their birthday can do the trick! You can also create separate holidays for parents during the vacation period of their children. You can allow them to exchange 2-3 days of leave in that time, so that they can travel with their children. These small leaves add up and allow your employees to show up recharged and rejuvenated. And a refreshed employee is naturally more productive at the workplace.

Take your employees out on food fiesta’s:

There’s a reason billion dollar organizations like google offer free daily buffet’s to their employees. They understand that quality food can improve the health of their employee. Moreover when food is provided daily, your employee has one less thing to worry about.

But spreading out a daily buffet can have a serious toll on your budget. Sometimes you might have the money to offer a buffet, somedays you may not have the money to offer a seven starter oriental style buffet lunch.

So if you can’t offer “ free food “ daily, you don’t need to do it daily.

The idea is to remain consistent with your food fiesta’s. So if you can just afford to take your employee’s out on a Friday evening – do that!

If you can afford to order takeout’s on Monday’s, Wednesday’s and Friday’s – do that.

If you can just afford to buy lunch on match days – do that!

The Core idea is to maintain food fiesta’s on a consistent basis. Create an experience your employees will look forward to and they will naturally stick within your organization.

You can offer a part of your company as shares or Bonus:

Most startups do this trick to reduce the churn rate of their organization. Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba is known for offering a part of his company to his oldest employees.

In fact, Jack ma has an assistant who stuck with him since the inception of the company. Apparently he awarded some shares to her and she is now worth in the millions of dollars.

So if you are looking to grab hold of your high employees, try talking to your senior management and offer a percentage of your organization to your employees. The percentage can depend upon their contribution and their level of seniority in the organization.

If shares don’t work for you, try offering annual bonuses for your employees regularly. Billion dollar venture – Airbnb offers frequent bonuses to its employees on an annual basis. This bonus is split from the profit it acquires every single year.

You can provide a flexible work schedule:

Ah, the holy grail of employee experience in the remote working era – Flexible work model.

You have to accept that COVID-19 has changed the way employees approach work and life. More employees are now willing to sacrifice a bit of salary for a flexible work schedule.

In a review conducted by CoSo cloud, it was found that 77% of employees preferred to work remotely. They believed that remote work allowed them to become more productive. It also helped them reduce the time and money wasted in commute hours.

Some employees also believe that a Remote work schedule allows them to spend quality time with their family on a regular basis.

And finally some people firmly believe that a flexible work schedule allows them tto focus on work effectively. They state that they can choose to work from home or travel to the office depending upon the type of work they need to complete on that specific day.

It’s true that a flexible work schedule may not be possible for all organizations. If you honestly believe that your employees need to commute to your office to perform quality work – do it.

But if you feel that they can be offered a flexible work setup – please do go for it. If you don’t, you might end up losing your employees to your competitors who offer a flexible work schedule.

Create Employee recognition awards and prizes:

Apart from a competitive salary and healthy work environment, your employees also need recognition. They need to be recognized for the hard work they put in and it needs to be awarded.

Here are some business organizations that offer a employee recognition award at scale

1. Disney – they have close to 180 employee recognition awards.
2. Zappos – They run a gift card program that allows employees to rate their peers on teh quality of their work
3. Groupon – it award it top performers with jackets and allows them to customize it to match their style

There is no set way to define your employee recognition awards programs. All you need to do is identify what your employees are doing on a daily basis. Find out a “ honest to god “ way to measure their contribution in every contribution they make to your organization.

NOTE: Your employees must be judged without any external factors like likeability, age, gender and race into the fold. If you believe that any of these come into play, you need to change the way you offer your recognition awards.

At the End of the Day, your awarding process must be based on transparency. If your employees see that it is not transparent, they will come to hate the whole venture of the recognition awards. That might end up counter-productive to the whole concept of the Employee Recognition awards.