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Offering Benefits to Retain Employees
Keeping good personnel is key to a successful operation. Once you’ve determined you need and want to hire staff, finding ways to keep them is important to save you time, money, training and stress. Though salary or wages are important, the research suggests that other employee engagement strategies can help keep employees. Work feels intrinsically engaging when people like the work they do, like the people they are around and see the meaning and purpose in their efforts. How do you create an engaging work environment? These strategies include activities such as:
1. Offering incentives that keep employees motivated – this includes items like gift cards, paid time off (vacation/sick leave), flexibility of hours, taking them to lunch or including them in a newsletter article. The goal is to keep employees excited about working for you.
2. Offering flexible benefit packages that allow employees to choose what is best for them. Benefits might include health care, retirement savings, or life insurance. We will explore more information about these benefits in subsequent sections of this document.
3. Fostering knowledge and skill development through job training - The more you encourage and reward personal development, the more you’ll be able to retain your best employees and improve morale. Training could include on the job training, training programs or even tuition reimbursement.
4. Promoting from within – This is one of the key employee retention strategies because it shows employees there is a chance for advancement within your business.
5. Communicating effectively - Owners and supervisors should be in contact with employees. Share your business’ mission and goals, keep tabs on emerging employee conflicts, show interest in their personal life (when appropriate), and make sure employees know you have an open-door policy. By keeping in regular contact, you motivate employees and make them more willing to truly care about the growth of your business.
6. Encouraging feedback and active listening – listening and follow up is important. Even if you can’t fix the issue identified, showing you care about their concerns and keeping employees in the informational loop builds trust.
Research suggests that recognition and engagement isn’t just good for retention. It also helps improve safety and productivity as well as reduces absenteeism. Successful recognition includes being sure the recognition is appropriate for the accomplishment, feels genuine, is personalized, is about achievement not favoritism and that it is part of the values and practices throughout the organization.
There are several types of benefits that can be offered to employees. These could include housing, expense and mileage reimbursements, use of farm vehicles, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, other types of insurance, pregnancy-related rights and accommodations, disability and religious accommodations, health Insurance, retirement savings and others. Information about many of these are in the Guidelines for Delaware and Maryland Farms on Writing an Employee Manual that accompany this material.
Action Steps/Questions to Consider:
Which of these strategies could you use to help further engage employees to support retention? Circle the numbers above that you think could work.
What would be some next steps for implementing the strategies you identified?
What can you do to show gratitude in a genuine, personalized and fair way?
What standard operating procedures could you put into place that would encourage communication?
What opportunities would you offer to your various employees?
What benefits would you consider offering to employees?
Which of the benefits listed above do you need more information about?
What are next steps?
References
Synnovatia. 6 Employee Retention Strategies to Reduce Small Business Turnover. Found: https://synnovatia.com/business-coaching-6-employee-retention-strategies-to-reduce-small businesses-turnover
Workhuman*. (March 29, 2023). Praise to Profits: The Business Case for Recognition at Work. Found: https://www.workhuman.com/resources/reports-guides/from-praise-to-profits workhuman-gallup-report
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This material is based upon work supported by USDA/NIFA under Award Number 2021‐70027‐34693, and is funded by the NE Risk Management Education Center.