“A strong company is built by a strong base of employees. We take great pride in encouraging our team to make healthy living a priority, which is of significant importance to our company’s vision for total employee care.” – Dean Austin, CEO of Austin Benefits Group

As Austin suggested, employees are essential ingredients for business. They help build your company to thrive in this continuously changing world. Employees also help a business to take care of customers and company’s needs. Thus, it is a win-win solution when you provide an employee what they need and want, and they will give their best for your organisation.

Likewise, providing employee basic needs such as bonuses and perks of employees is a must do. Yet, in today’s tight talent competition, you need to add more ingredients to your employee retention practices. Here are seven practical ways your organisation can adapt to help your employee grow and shine their way.

See also: 5 Characteristics of Mentor-able Individuals

Focus on overall wellbeing

Overall wellbeing means you need to focus on both workplace and employee wellbeing. These two things are complementary with each other, as when you provide a supportive and happy working environment, it will reduce employees turnover. On the other hand, focusing on employees wellbeing such as giving treatment on their physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing will make them more productive, motivated, and thriving in their careers. A survey showed that 91 percent of workers at companies led by leaders that support wellbeing efforts said they feel satisfied and motivated to do their best at their jobs.  

Invest in professional development

Investing in professional development is one of the highest-impact strategies to combating stress that a company can do, said 48 percent of employees in a survey. Other than that, professional development can also help employees thrive in today’s business and be competent in their profession as well as excel in it.

Create a learning culture

Learning culture is an important value of a modern workplace as it keeps an ambitious team on the side. It can also promote mindset of high performance, and align learning with business objectives. A strong organisational learning culture will result in more productivity, efficiency, profit, and ability for individuals to embrace and adopt change. A management theory found that learning culture can also increase 10 percent of staffs which resulted in 8.6 percent increased productivity.

Give the employee a voice

Employee voice aka voice of employee is long known to be very effective to make them feel included in organisation. Voice of an employee is an opportunity for them to express concerns about policies in workplace and offer ideas about how to improve conditions in workplace. A survey by Chastity Fox revealed that providing a voice of employee can increase retention, engagement, job satisfaction, and give higher performance ratings.

Connect them to a mentor

Gallup reported that 87 percent millennials said development is important in a job, compared to more than 69 percent non-millennials who cited the same. Due to this reason, the presence of a mentor is important in a company. Mentoring relationship can foster a positive and productive working relationship. They can also help employees learn and gain encouragement and support in an employee’s career. Mentors will provide information that employees need which will be so helpful for them.

Build a social connection for employee

Work relationship is important in any case of workplace. Especially for full-time employees, relationship amongst staffs is essential to build stronger positivity to one another. In addition, work relationship can also be associated with employee wellbeing, stress level, productivity, and a general feeling of happiness. It means that without a strong form of workplace relationship, you will lose half of your company value.

Provide meaningful work

A survey cited that having a sense of meaning from work is one of many factors to build satisfaction and engagement between an individual and their job. When people have a sense of meaning in their work, they will become more committed to their organisation they work for and have a greater drive for producing results. Therefore, the last practice is you should provide meaningful work for your employees.

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