HR teams are responsible for creating strategies that will boost employee engagement and decrease turnover rates.

In today’s world, not only are human resources professionals operating in a very different organisational environment, they are also expected to deliver results faster. In addition, a war on talent has meant that employees are in a better position to find new job opportunities. This is why it’s become even more important for employers to pay attention to employee grievances, understand why they quit, and to seek retention strategies to keep employees engaged in their jobs. In return, these retainment strategies will have a positive impact on the company’s turnover rate.

1. Understanding why employees leave

While HR professionals and employers may agree that inadequate compensation is one of the reasons why employees quit their jobs, it’s not the only reason. If employees feel undervalued and dissatisfied, they are likely to seek for employment opportunities where they will feel valued. However, there are more critical reasons why employees leave their jobs:

2. Getting the recruitment process right

Quality employees with the right set of skills are hard to come by, and increased competition among organisations seeking for candidates with specialized skills, means that HR departments need to minimise the time it takes to hire new employees by:

Intelligently competing for talent: While organisations increasingly need highly specialised roles, their HR teams generally have insufficient data, or the right ability to use it in order to find the right people.

Streamlining the recruitment process: Many companies believe that providing more resources, more tools or more information minimises the average time it takes for HR to fill in a new position. However, these strategies are hardly efficient. Instead, HR teams need to pay more attention to streamlining the recruitment process. This includes:

1. Realigning resources for recruitment in order to speed up the hiring of current and future posts.

2. Reassessing and removing hidden processes that minimise the speed of the recruitment process.

3. Reduce the number of people who are involved in influencing the hiring decision.

3. Retention strategies

Recruiting new staff is time-consuming, costs a lot of money and is stressful. Once organisations have found the right staff, they need to develop strategies to keep them. Employers need to acknowledge that what attracts employees to a job is different from what keeps them in the job. Today’s employees are looking for job aspects that go beyond the pay, including a suitable company culture, recognition and a work/life balance.

In addition, Kay de Jongh, HR Administrator at PathCare suggests that getting employee retainment right involves understanding where the problem with the individual organisation is. "Not all retention strategies will apply to every company because each is unique. Therefore, identifying the problem within your organisation will help you gain insights to why employees are leaving and what offerings will make them stay," she says.

These are a few strategies that the most effective HR departments and teams use in order to retain employees:

If you’d like further information regarding recruitment and retention strategies for your organistion, the Future of HR Summit and Awards, is where you need to be. We’ve partnered with the awards again this year to bring you an event that addressed the transformation of the HR function in South African business. Beyond that:

1. The Future of HR Summit aims to “address the exciting transformation of the HR function in the business environment, forecast trends for 2016, share innovative and strategic approaches to overcoming challenges, discuss practical methods of employee engagement, talent acquisition, and empowering leadership, and provide thought provoking content, and unique networking opportunities.”

2. The Future of HR Awards seeks to "recognise South Africa’s most influential participants of people management strategies, leadership and innovation. It identifies business pioneers, highlighting their accolades for the world to see. The Awards brings South Africa’s icons from business and government together.”

This year the Future of HR Summit and Awards was held in Johannesburg from the 20th to the 21st of July 2016.