Employee Retention Archives

Why Showing Gratitude to Your Employees Can Lead to Higher Productivity

Most employees cite their income, work environment, and company culture as reasons why they enjoy their roles. However, how they feel about their positions matters as well.

Employees feel good when their employers appreciate them. These employees often share their positive emotions with colleagues and coworkers. The cycle of smiles, generosity, and random acts of kindness impacts others in the organization. This leads to greater feelings of employee appreciation.

As a manager, you influence how your employees feel when they are at work. This is why you should be giving praise for employee achievements.

Providing autonomy and constructive feedback shows your employees they are valued and respected. This promotes engagement, productivity, and retention.

Discover how showing gratitude for your employees can increase productivity and how you can attain this objective.

Attractive Company Culture

Employees who feel appreciated often express gratitude for their colleagues and coworkers. This promotes feelings of appreciation throughout the organization. Companies that emphasize employee appreciation have an attractive culture. This encourages job seekers to apply to the organization.

Increased Employee Engagement

Employees who feel appreciated typically have high job satisfaction. They are committed to performing their best and reaching business goals. This results in strong customer satisfaction and revenue for a healthy bottom line.

Elevated Employee Performance

Expressing gratitude to your employees shows you appreciate their contributions and results. This creates a source of pride in their work. Employees who are proud of their achievements typically put in their best effort.

Stronger Employee Retention

Expressing gratitude to your employees shows they are valued and respected members of your team. This encourages your employees to perform their best. Employees who enjoy their roles are likely to remain with your organization long-term. This reduces hiring costs.

Methods to Express Employee Appreciation

Publicly give thanks for each employee’s specific contributions, results, and impacts on the organization.
Provide a donation in the employee’s name to a charity they care about.
Create a reward system that provides points to redeem for a gift card, remote work day, vacation day, or other awards.
Provide a bonus, pay increase, or promotion when appropriate.
Publicly give thanks for each employee’s specific contributions, results, and impacts on the organization.

Frequency of Employee Appreciation

A survey by Authentic Recognition found the following:

2% Received Daily recognition
11% Received Weekly recognition
20% Received Quarterly recognition
17% Received Annual recognition
29% Received No recognition of any kind.

Source: https://authenticrecognition.com/how-frequently-should-you-give-recognition/

Want to Increase Your Team’s Productivity?

Expressing gratitude to your employees helps them feel valued and respected. This encourages your employees to remain engaged, productive, and loyal to your organization.

Many HR managers and People leaders follow the R.I.S.E. method when implementing their recognition program. This concept highlights how employee appreciation should be regular, immediate, specific, and encouraging.

If you’re looking for other ideas to express employee appreciation, or you need to add employees to your team, include Casey Accounting & Finance Resources in your hiring process. Learn more today.

How a Strong Company Culture Can Lead to Better Retention

Your company’s culture is one of its biggest assets. It shows what your organization stands for and serves as a guide for employee interactions.

Having a well-developed culture can encourage the best talent to work for you. Once these employees become part of your organization, they are likely to remain for an extended time.

The longer your employees remain, the higher your retention rates. This lowers the amount of time and money spent on hiring, which improves your bottom line.

Find out how you can develop a strong company culture to improve your employee retention rates.

Business Guidance

Displaying a strong mission, vision, and values provides employees with a sense of guidance and security. It shows what you stand for as a company. This helps attract employees who align with your culture.

Employees with values in line with your company’s values tend to make better business decisions. This typically aligns with your company’s vision and business strategy.

Be sure to advertise your culture and exhibit it in everything your organization does. For instance, regularly talk about your company’s vision and strategy. Include what these topics mean for different teams. Helping your employees better understand the company can improve engagement, motivation, and retention.

Include your company values when evaluating employee performance. This can improve engagement.

Flexible Work Arrangements

Offering remote or hybrid work and a flexible schedule helps your employees manage work-life balance. Letting them handle their personal needs during the workday helps lower stress. This reduces the odds of experiencing burnout.

Your employees may desire additional paid time off (PTO), stipends for child care, or paid parental or personal leave. Providing these accommodations shows you care about your employees’ well-being.

Talk with your employees about individual accommodations they may need to fit their personal circumstances. Increased flexibility typically leads to increased retention.

Performance Recognition

Regularly thanking your employees for their efforts and results helps them feel appreciated. This tends to elevate engagement, productivity, and retention.

Performance recognition should take a variety of forms. This may include a hand-written thank-you note, verbal praise during an individual or team meeting, or a mention on the company intranet.

Regularly point out your employees’ contributions to benefit the organization. Include each employee’s specific actions, their results, and how they impacted the business. Provide bonuses, raises, or promotions when appropriate.

Looking for Accounting and Finance Professionals?

Employees want to work for companies that have a strong culture. You can promote your culture by using it to guide employees to make business decisions. You also can offer flexible work arrangements and provide performance recognition to increase the attractiveness of your workplace. All of these factors contribute to your retention rates.

If you need help adding accounting and finance professionals to your team, talk with Casey Accounting & Finance Resources. Learn more today.

Importance of Stay Interviews for Employee Retention

The best time to discover what your company can do to keep employees is before they plan to leave. Knowing in advance what causes staff to stay or go is one way to reduce attrition. One of the best ways to retain team members is by conducting stay interviews. Stay interviews let you measure individual job satisfaction and engagement on an ongoing basis. This helps increase employee happiness and reduce turnover.

Here are several reasons why stay interviews are an effective way to increase employee retention.

Determine Job Satisfaction

Implementing stay interviews uncovers how satisfied an employee is with their job. You can find out what is going well and what needs improvement. This lets you address issues before they grow and become out of hand. If you see a similar problem among multiple staff members, you can decide whether organizational changes need to be made.

Guide Actionable Steps

Because stay interviews are personalized, they provide an outline of what individual employees need to stay with the company. The information is specific and forward-thinking. Having concrete ideas for how to improve the employee experience makes it easier to eliminate major frustrations and promote retention.

Allow Time for Improvement

Taking the time for stay interviews provides the opportunity to implement desired changes. Because employees have not yet considered leaving, there is less pressure to immediately solve the problem. If pay, a promotion, employee training, or something out of your scope comes up, be truthful in your response. For instance, mention that salaries are frozen, or a position is not open. Or discuss adding training opportunities during the next budget cycle so your team member can upskill to secure a promotion.

Provide Metrics

Conducting stay interviews lets you create top-level metrics. These supplement secondary and tertiary metrics like employee satisfaction surveys and exit interviews. Reviewing an employee relationship with the company, the project team, and you as their manager shows what you can do to make the relationship better. All of these metrics make up an essential part of your retention strategy.

Strengthen Company Culture

Engaging in stay interviews makes the company culture stronger. Staff members appreciate having the opportunity to share their input and have it acted on when possible. This is especially important when major changes are taking place, such as a reduction in force. Individual discussions about job satisfaction help air grievances, potentially keeping your remaining team.

Hire Accounting and Finance Professionals

Conducting stay interviews is a productive way to retain employees. Understanding what keeps them working for you or causes them to want to leave provides time to correct the issues before they lead to attrition. It is easier and more profitable to retain staff members than to hire new ones.

When you are in the market for accounting & finance talent, turn to Casey Accounting & Finance Resources. We are dedicated to excellence through education and investing in our staff so we can provide the highest quality of performance for our clients. Learn more today.

How to Retain Your Best Talent: Employees Need to Be Connected to the Company

It has been said that it takes a lot more to maintain a happy workforce than it did years ago. This is supported by statistics, like the fact that nearly two-thirds of the workforce is actively disengaged from their jobs, and many others are using work time to search for other opportunities.

One of the better ways of keeping employees satisfied in their careers is to offer support for learning and development. Let’s face it, the convergence of personal and professional is happening more often in the workforce. People want support for their goals. How can your company develop enough programs to meet the unique needs of all its employees?

1. Make learning a core value in the workplace.

When learning is a value of the company, it becomes a normal aspect of the culture. This enables employees – who previously would be searching for new learning opportunities outside of work – to confidently pursue their professional development. Create a system to reimburse employees for continuing education. Send them to conferences. Purchase webinars if your budget is smaller. Encourage your staff to read articles throughout the day.

2. Identify learning and development programs that cater to employees at all levels.

Because learning styles can be so vastly different from one employee to the next, often driven by generational characteristics, learning and development programs need to be varied. Blend classroom learning programs with on-demand eLearning. Survey employees to find out what they want to learn and link this to their career goals. Not everyone wants to sit in front of a computer for a 60-minute webinar, and not everyone wants to go hear a local speaker.

3. Bring industry-leading programs and experts directly to employees.

Get your employees excited about learning and connect them deeper to the company by bringing learning to them. Set up brown bag lunch and learn sessions, offer special talks from industry leaders, and create a full learning environment that includes employees of all generations and interests. Taking that information from outside topics and relating it to your company’s processes provides a natural connection for your employees.

4. Promote and reward learning achievers.

To create a deep connection with employees, link their learning efforts to performance. If they participate, reward them for making this commitment to excellence. Set up promotions and bonuses based on learning initiatives. The incentives don’t have to be anything major. You can tie salaries to something like continuing education or certifications. A small gesture like a gift card to a movie theater will be appreciated, especially if you recognize employees publicly.

Work with a Leading Financial Recruiter in Chicago

When your financial group has an employment need for top financial talent, work with the award-winning financial recruiters at Casey Accounting & Finance Resources. Contact our great team today to get started!