Employee retention is a plus for any business. If the people working for you can (and do) cut the mustard, you want to keep them. Here are three reasons:

1. You get benefits from experienced, trained, and seasoned employees: today’s posting.
2. You spend lots of money replacing employees you do not retain: tomorrow’s posting.
3. You can apply Employee Engagement as a “retention tool” and gain numerous other benefits as well: Thursday’s posting.

Today’ let’s look at that first reason to increase employee retention: bigger and better benefits to the business.

The longer an employee is on board, the greater her knowledge of

• Her job. One becomes more familiar with the work he does, the more he does the work. As that familiarity increases, so do productivity and quality.
• The company. As familiarity with one’s job increases, her attention expands to others’ functions, to how specific jobs are part of a bigger whole. That bigger whole is the company.
• Its customers. Impossible to work for any company and not hear, learn, know about the customers. Impossible to work longer and not know more about those customers. The more an employee knows about the customers, the stronger his basis for doing work that satisfies the customer.

The longer an employee works for a company, the greater his commitment to

• His job. Knowing one’s job and doing one’s job most often leads to (a sense of) owning one’s job. Ownership is commitment. Commitment relates to pride. Pride usually stimulates better work.
• The company. Not only does the company invest in its employees, the employee invests his time and energy, skills and knowledge in the company. That investment creates a desire for success. That desire to succeed generates commitment to the company.
• Its values. Commitment to job. Commitment to company. Add to those an employee’s (increasing) time with the company. The sum is the employee’s commitment to what the company stands for, what the company values.

The longer employees perform for one business, the better their performance as

• Providers of quality work. The longer one performs, the better her performance. That’s quality work. Quality work produces quality product, quality service.
• Expressers of performance improvement. The more time (and energy) an employee spends performing a function, the better she knows the function. So she knows how to do it better.
• Creators of innovative ideas. Becoming increasingly aware of the work and ways to improve the work, sparks one’s desire to view the work from different angles. That varied viewing is creativity. When that creativity is put to work, it’s innovation.

The benefits boil down to these: knowledge, commitment, and performance.
The longer you retain each good employee, the greater those benefits. The more good employees you retain, the broader those benefits.

Stop by tomorrow when we look at the flip side: the costs of replacing employees you do not retain.

Curious about how Employee Engagement can increase employee retention? It’s all about culture.

Tags: Creativity, Employee Engagement, Management