4 Simple & Affordable Employee Retention Strategies That Companies Should Consider

Though many top managers and executives don't see it this way, a company cannot survive without its employees. If you see your subordinates as expendable, you're taking the wrong approach to management. Employee retention strategies are crucial to the successful operation of any business. There tend to be management meetings in various organizations and discussing these strategies should be a talking point sometimes.

Business continuity planning helps organizations to ensure that they can remain afloat if unthinkable occurrences come along and turn things upside down. In the same breath, employee retention techniques should be discussed to ensure that the company can retain those who can not only meet the requirements of their job descriptions, but are also familiar with the operations and inner workings of the business. 

Life is about more than just financial incentives. Executives may be under the impression that the best retention strategy is to throw more money as employees. Unfortunately, financial power doesn't exist in every situation. While quantitative benefits are not unimportant, many employees are now becoming more focused on the quality of life perks. These may include health care, more time off, flexible scheduling, workplace flexibility, etc. 

The point is that building a healthy company culture cannot completely revolve around thinking that paying people more is always going to take their problems away. That thought can even be categorized under the umbrella of remote management mistakes when you have a hybrid working from home environment where some employees are based in the traditional office and others are at home.

Such a culture automatically implies that staff morale may be a problem. Unless management is very effective at keeping everyone engaged and mitigating the effects of isolation, there's already an uphill battle with people having to stay apart. Such a situation is arguably the one where employee retention programs need to take front and center. So, it's time to look at some strategies that can help with building a small business team and retaining it using employee retention strategies that are not going to lead to huge spending.

Dress Code Alterations

Whether you have a hybrid work environment or people are just required to come into the office, companies usually have a dress code that employees must follow. This is typically communicated during the orientation period, and a human resource policy tends to speak to what employees are expected to look like during their work hours. It is an effective employee retention strategies. While there's nothing wrong with setting a precedent for what professionalism should look like, some companies often take it too far. 

It is possible to maintain a professional aesthetic without having rigid and complex requirements that often make employees feel uncomfortable. One of the most basic retention strategies for employers to consider is relaxing the dress code. This doesn't mean people are going to start coming to work wearing casual clothing daily, but the small change can go a long way in helping employees feel a bit more fulfilled when they have greater autonomy over the way they look while they work.

Home Equipment

Now, you may be asking yourself the question, “How is providing equipment to employees at home, not a costly retention strategy?” You are not wrong for having that concern, but it all depends on the way that the company chooses to go about it. Going the traditional route is undoubtedly going to be a costly investment. How much do you think getting every employee who's working remotely a home standing desk is going to cost the company? 

Now, the benefit here is not from providing the employee with the furniture at no cost. The real benefit comes from the employee feeling like the company at least cares enough to do something for them to have the facilities they need to be able to work from home comfortably. So, what your company can consider doing is purchasing the equipment on behalf of the employees and using a salary deduction program to have them repay over a feasible and affordable period.

So, your employees get to live and work in the kind of comfort that is likely to contribute to creativity and productivity, while the business benefits from the increased work rate. Additionally, you create a greater sense of job enrichment without technically costing the company a dime in the long run. Of course, if it is possible to subsidize the cost to some extent, the organization should do so.

Birthday Days Off

This feeds into the quality of life discussion that was raised above. People are becoming more acutely aware of how important it is for them to have benefits that are more conducive to their physical and mental health than those that mean more money in their pockets. Implementing something as simple as a birthday day off is another in the line of stellar employee retention strategies that don't need to cost the company a dime.

For most people, birthdays form important milestones in their lives, and it would be nice to almost always reliably be able to have the day away from the hustle and bustle of work requirements when the special time comes around. Of course, you would need to formalize the system to ensure that people make requests in the same way that they would with the vacation leave.

You also don't necessarily need to make the day selection a rigid thing. So, while the true birthday occurs on a specific day, you could give your staff members the freedom to choose any day in the month that they would like to be off from work. For some staff members, they may be able to identify days that are more convenient than the actual birthday, and giving them this freedom also feeds into the potential for retention.

Location Flexibility

Multiple references were made above to remote work. Some managers are averse to this for a host of different reasons. However, some of the employees in your firm may likely be able to work remotely based on the duties that they are required to perform. There is nothing wrong with seeing work as a set of tasks to be done as opposed to a designated place to be. While you don't have to indefinitely assign people to work from home, having the option is enough to count as another in the line of employee retention strategies.