The Top 6 Ways Improving Workplace Experience Can Reduce Attrition

Reducing employee attrition is one of the main priorities of organizations today—and as a result, many companies are increasing their focus on workplace experience.

Research shows over 3.98 million workers quit their jobs in each month of 2021 in the USA alone.

And experts say that improving workplace experience can play a major role in reducing attrition. So we released our latest guide—Tackling Attrition: Time to Ramp Up Employee & Workplace Experience—to help companies understand how focusing on workplace experience can reduce employee churn.

What Leads to Poor Employee Attrition

There’s no one cause for high employee attrition. So, it’s essential to consider every factor when trying to understand why people are leaving your organization. Here are some of the common reasons for high employee attrition rate:

• Poor benefits
• Poor compensation
• Poor work-life balance
• Lack of paid time off
• Industry changes
• Job security fears
• Changes in regulation
• Poor working relationships between workers and supervisors
• Poor working relationships between coworkers

How Improving Employee & Workplace Experience Can Boost Retention

Focusing on why employees may quit their jobs is key to boosting retention. Start by surveying your employees to identify their priorities.

The key is to create a positive work culture and healthy work-life balance, and ensure that your employees don’t feel like their feedback isn't being acted upon.

While engaged employees are valuable to the business, disengaged employees can be extremely costly. According to a Gallup report, the accumulated cost of disengaged employees can reach $60.3 million annually for a company of 10,000 employees.

Modern companies are taking note of these costs by investing in programs to enhance the overall employee and workplace experience.

Here are some of the ways you can improve workplace experiences to improve retention:

1. Optimize Each Stage of the Employee Life Cycle (ELC)

The employee life cycle is a valuable framework for analyzing various stages of work. This journey will shape the entire company experience.

The common stages of ELC include:

• Recruitment and hiring
• Employee onboarding and orientation
• Employee training
• Retention and employee satisfaction
• Onboarding and conducting exit interviews

It’s essential to create employee programs that are measurable, targeted to specific people, and have clear objectives. For example, if you have deskless shift workers, they’ll require extra or different training than a remote customer service representative.

Taking these differences into account can enable you to invest in the right programs and tools catered to specific employee tasks to improve the experience.

Employees who know they have room for career development will likely stay in a company longer. You will require a practical training and development program to focus on developing the next generation of leaders in-house.

With such programs, your employees will remain motivated and loyal when they know their company is investing in them for the future.
Equally important, training your employees and then losing them due to attrition will impact your bottom line significantly.

Businesses can retain their top talent by offering the necessary incentives to boost motivation. Part of your training and development should allow the employees to recalibrate their goals—and allow you to monitor employee performance.

2. Boost your Internal Communication Strategies

Workplace communication is a crucial tool for nurturing positive employee and workplace experience. Clear communication in the workplace is valuable to help workers and management exchange information quickly, ultimately building trust, forming connections, driving collaboration, and increasing engagement.

Your comms team should do more than just disseminate information. They should help motivate employees by creating a sense of community around shared goals.

Having a greater sense of purpose enables employees to achieve higher productivity and become more engaged and loyal. And these employees are likely to become your top ambassadors.

3. Prioritize Employee Wellness

Flexibility in the workplace is crucial for various reasons. Here‘s why:

• Although 83% believe their workplaces are flexible, only 60% of employees agree
• 83% of employers believe they adjusted their workplaces during the pandemic to allow flexibility, but only 69% of workers agree

Flexibility is undeniably a critical part of employee well-being. Workers that are stressed out and don’t have a proper work-life balance are less motivated and more likely to leave.

Plus, with the health risks associated with the pandemic, employers need to ensure that their workplace policies and office setup are designed to protect employee wellness.

4. Foster Workplace Growth and Development

Modern employees don’t just want money. They want opportunities to develop and grow. Organizations that invest in employee development show their employees that they matter and their potential is recognized. And if you don't offer these benefits, employees are more likely to leave.

Encouraging and supporting your employees is one of the best ways to retain top talent. According to a LinkedIn study, 94% of employees say they prioritize working in companies that play active roles in their training and development.

You may also consider a mentorship program to offer employees targeted feedback on their career trajectories. Developing the program internally enables you to connect with all workplace employees.

5. Act on Employee Feedback

Collecting feedback from employees is your greatest asset to understanding employee experiences. A key part of collecting feedback and acting on it is to reassure workers that their opinions matter.

While most organizations collect feedback, very few make an effort to actually act on it, which leads to less trusting employees. Showing employees that you care about how they feel and what they think will motivate them and increase trust.

Listening to employees should be more than just gathering input. It means taking time to analyze every point and respond to every employee.

6. Refine Your Workforce Technology

Most importantly, companies must embrace modern technology to create the workplace experience that employees today expect. Most workers carry out tedious or repetitive tasks on a daily basis that could be automated with new tech to give employees more time to work on the things they care about.

By investing in technology for employees, your organization will realize various benefits including:

• Streamlined repetitive tasks
• Higher productivity
• Cut overhead cost savings
• Access to diverse talent
• Better customer experiences

Your employees are your customers. So creating a positive workplace experience for employees means creating more satisfied customers.

A good workplace experience not only enhances employee satisfaction, but it also reduces attrition, saving you time and money when it comes to hiring new employees.