When it comes to growing a business, many employers are so focused on profit and loss statements that they fail to recognize one of their greatest assets, their employees. That’s a big mistake. In today’s business world where job openings are at their highest level in years, more and more employees (especially Millennials) are changing jobs around the two-year mark. As a result, companies in a variety of industries are finding it harder to retain top talent. That’s a serious challenge for any business, because losing quality employees not only disrupts the workplace and damages employee morale, it’s also really bad for the bottom line.

If your company’s employee turnover rates are on the rise, here’s a look at 5 effective strategies for doing employee retention right.

1. Offer Job Flexibility
As younger employees flood into the workforce to fill the gap created by retiring baby boomers, those organizations that offer job flexibility have a much better chance of retaining their employees. For some employees, job flexibility comes in the form of compressed work schedules, and on-site daycare. But for a growing number of workers, true flexibility lies in opportunities to work from home.

Also known as telecommuting and remote work, working from home is becoming the new normal for many employees of forward thinking organizations. That’s not surprising, as employees view working from home as a hugely desirable benefit. According to statistics from FlexJobs, 79 percent of full-time workers want to work from home at least part of the time. And 65 percent of workers feel that working from home makes them more productive.

Kaplan, Aetna, and Intuit are just a few of the many companies that have enjoyed higher retention by offering job flexibility, in particular, opportunities to work from home.

2. Promote Seamless Collaboration
Employees in today’s younger workforce have been brought up on technology. As a result, communication delays, malfunctioning software, and intuitive averse systems can be very aggravating—to the point that they can cause frustrated employees to start looking at online job sites for other opportunities. Organizations that implement tools and technologies to streamline and enhance employee communication and collaboration on projects will benefit from increased productivity and decreased turnover.

3. Encourage Engagement
Every employee can get a paycheck these days. But feeling that they are a part of something bigger than they are—that they are contributing in some way to helping the company move forward and making people’s lives better—that’s inspiring and engaging, and it leads to higher job satisfaction and long term retention.

Building your corporate brand to reflect genuine core values can go a long way in helping to attract quality people who share those values and will want to work with you. And when employees recognize that their company is for real, they will become loyal brand advocates, going out of their way to tell others about it through social media channels such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And this kind of advocacy can attract others who would also like to be a part of the company.

4. Provide Opportunities for Growth
No employee likes to feel like they are stuck in a rut. This is especially true of employees who are high achievers and are attracted to companies that provide ample opportunities for growth and advancement. But growth doesn’t just happen. It takes properly trained managers who can recognize potential and then act as coaches and mentors. In this open learning environment, employees can set and achieve career goals—receiving encouragement and recognition from management along the way—to reach their full potential and remain fulfilled working where they are.

5. Hire the Right Employees in the First Place
It sounds simple enough, but hiring the right employees for the right jobs is a very effective way to enjoy high employee retention. Still, as anyone in management and HR will tell you, hiring the right people takes a great deal of time, effort and expertise. After all, prospective job candidates must be effectively interviewed, and carefully considered to make sure that they are the right fit, not just for the position, but for the corporate culture as well.

Fortunately there are a number of online HR tools available that can make the hiring process more effective. Among these tools are those that can help interviewers ask the right questions to better determine candidate competency. Other tools can help to expedite the investigation of potential candidates, even to the point of aggregating all of the interviewee’s social media feeds into one convenient place.

Once a candidate is hired, hr software can also help to make the onboarding process as smooth, efficient, and effective as possible. These tools are invaluable for helping new employees become quickly, actively and productively engaged in their new position.  
 
As today’s workforce continues to evolve, those organizations that evolve with it by implementing sound strategies to keep employees engaged, advancing and fulfilled stand to enjoy, not just higher rates of long term employee retention, but also long term growth and profitability.