5+ remote employee retention strategies to keep your top performers

What if I told you that 73% of employees are looking for new opportunities. Yes, that includes your own team members who might not be happy with the team culture, company organization, or development paths. 

Focusing your HR efforts on your employee retention strategy brings a series of benefits that make it impossible to omit it out of your daily routine, including:

• Reducing recruitment and training costs
• Maintaining a strong team culture
• Improving employee wellness efforts and reducing job burnout
• Increasing productivity
• Boosting morale and happiness at work
• Supporting company-wide transparency and increasing trust
• Providing a better customer experience and increasing revenue
  

But before we get into the nitty-gritty of remote employee retention strategies, let’s talk about the elephant in the room:

Why do employees leave?

There’s a couple of obvious reasons why someone would leave a company: low pay, negative relationships with their colleagues, looking for a new challenge, wanting to be a part of a different work culture.

But then there’s the reasons we seem to neglect:

• 12% of workers seek a better work-life balance
• 24% wish they received more recognition for their work
• 8 out of 10 people will start looking for a new job after experiencing one single bad day at their current workplace
• Burnout is making individuals 2.3 times for likely to look for new opportunities
  

Remote employee retention strategies aren’t costly and will help you fix all of the issues above. Here’s how.

Get your team members involved in projects that will help them shine

Learning and development is constantly being referenced as a primary factor to consider when getting and keeping a job. Give your employees a solid role within your company so they won’t hide behind projects they'll never get public credit for.

Putting them face-to-face with a chance to actively contribute to the company’s success keeps them accountable and more engaged.

This can be done in many ways:

• The Atlassian team has a blog for their developers where team members can showcase their knowledge
• Adobe gets their team involved in their YouTube channel
• The Google search team alternates between hosting videos and live Q&A sessions
• HubSpot’s team members help as instructors for their Academy courses

Offer tailored benefits

We’ve previously gone over some of the fun perks companies offer to stand out in an increasingly competitive talent market.

But where do organizations go wrong?

A few mistakes companies make when providing employee benefits are:

• Failing to customize them to every employee’s need
• Purchasing benefits that work for your current culture but omitting unconventional options
• Forgetting to ask employees for their feedback or using enough data before making a purchase
• Not communicating and promoting the benefit packages to your team
• Replacing expensive, mandatory benefits with cheaper ones employees might not like
• Not keeping track of the performance of these benefits
  

Remote employee benefits aren’t a one-size-fits-all and they certainly aren’t created equal. We let you focus on keeping your team happy and engaged by taking over the benefits duty. Panther offers private healthcare and life insurance for your entire team in over 175 countries. We help you reduce costs through unique discounts, by covering your teammates under one plan with us.

Rethink your hiring [and onboarding] process

You can predict how long a person will stay with your company before you hire them. Strong onboarding processes can set a good impression and increase your chances of keeping talent by 82%. And you might not know this is an innovative employee retention strategy.

Go over our checklist of onboarding best practices to see what common blunders you can avoid and how to create a memorable onboarding experience.

Improve your management

In a past article, we talked about how “poor leadership” was one of the main cons employees cited on Glassdoor company pages. And it’s also one of the leading causes for team members leaving organizations that otherwise seem like an ideal place.

The main problem lies with a lack of communication from the leader’s side. What does good team-manager communication look like? 

• Holding regular one-on-one meetings to find potential struggles an employee could have
• Offering clear task instructions and resources
• Regularly recognizing every team member for their achievements
• Providing constructive criticism instead of negative feedback
• Making time to talk to someone without delegating that task or communicating through a third-person
• Genuinely inquiring about a team member’s health and wellbeing
• Asking employees for feedback before making a decision or purchase
  

Another one of the leading duties of a manager is to be a mentor. Starting a mentorship program should be a no-brainer given that 89% of employees with mentors feel like their work is valued.

Show constant recognition for an employee’s achievements, no matter how small

To ensure the effectiveness of employee retention strategies you’ll naturally have to focus on the core problems too. Showing recognition is a good place to start. 

But don’t just thank your remote team after huge achievements. Recognition comes in multiple forms that span across an employee’s entire lifecycle with your company.

You can show your appreciation by accommodating work schedules and environments to every person, letting your team choose between remote-hybrid-office work attendance, or catering to their professional development needs. Also, ensure your employee recognition programs align with your company’s values and promises to new recruits. For example, if you boasted your reskilling and wellness strategies, focus your main efforts there. These are two of the trending HR highlights to keep an eye on in the upcoming years for a good reason: they keep people happy and ensure they enjoy working for your company, limiting the chance of them leaving.

Finally, remember to regularly check in on sentiment with your employees, whether that’s through one-on-ones or engagement surveys. This helps you adapt the strategies you use to reduce employee absenteeism and enhance employee retention for good. 

Among the things you can ask to guarantee you get their honest thoughts and signs of a potential leave are: 

• How do you feel today in relation to your work and colleagues?
• Would you recommend our company to your friends as a workplace?
• What makes you excited about coming to work?
• Was there ever a time when you felt proud to be a part of your team or projects?
• What company values resonate with you the most?
• Are you receiving the recognition you deserve from managers and teammates?
• Are leadership members involved in your success [development, culture initiatives, etc.]?
• Do you see yourself working with us after three years?
• Have you thought of quitting this role at any point? If yes, why?
• Do you find work processes, workflows, tools, and policies clear?
• Was there ever a moment when you didn’t feel like you trusted the company, its leaders, or your team members?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash