We’ve explored that employee retention is a plus for any business. We’ve looked at the first and second of three reasons:
- You get benefits from retaining experienced, trained, and seasoned employees: Tuesday’s posting.
- You spend lots of money replacing employees you do not retain: yesterday’s posting.
- You can apply Employee Engagement as a “retention tool” and gain numerous other benefits as well: this posting.
We do get around to a hard and fast look at Employee Engagement as an employee retention tool today.
Simple, really.
Engaged employees are more likely to stick with their company.
Engaged employees increase the attraction power of the workplace and make others — especially talented candidates — want to stick.
How is this? Why is this?
I offer you five answers:
- Engagement satisfies. An engaged employee derives satisfaction from his engagement. In return that satisfaction stimulates further engagement. Sticky factor: the satisfied employee has fewer reasons to leave.
- Engagement motivates. Engagement is a feel-good factor. Feeling good is motivational in that one seeks to repeat the feeling. Sticky factor: the employee feeling good comes back willingly for more.
- Engagement energizes. The eagerness to engage (see above) translates to energy to engage. The energy is usually a combination of physical, mental and emotional. Sticky factor: energized people want to expend their energy; an engaged employee already knows a good place to expend that energy.
- Engagement expands. Because engagement fuels engagement, an engaged employee usually looks for more ways to engage. If possible, she looks to expand that engagement in her job or surrounding work situations. Sticky factor: sticky leads to more sticky.
- Engagement fulfills. The contentment from one’s work engagement returns a sense of fulfillment (greater than mere satisfaction). This reduces — even precludes — stress. Sticky factor: fulfillment is self-reinforcing, especially once achieved.
Employee retention is beneficial to a company.
Employee turnover is costly to a company.
Employee engagement is a readily applicable employee retention tool.
