Ensuring you provide a positive, productive and innovative workplace environment with plenty of employee recognition and rewards might be more important than employers realise, particularly in this New Year period.
Temptation is Great
The ‘New Year, New You’ motto rings true not only for health and fitness, but also extends to the minds of employees who might be looking for a new job or a new challenge. With the constant media barrage reinforcing the ‘New Year, New You’ message, employees can very easily be tempted to look around.
This general assumption of New Year restlessness has been proven correct by statistics from a national employee survey released by Each Person, a provider of a recognition and rewards scheme that enables employers to boost employee participation and engagement. The survey from Each Person [1] revealed that 52% of respondents said that they were considering leaving their job in the New Year – a concerning statistic for employers.
New Year Staff Turnover Spikes
The average annual staff turnover rate stands at 15% [2] although this varies hugely between sectors and geographical regions. This rate also spikes in January and February. The highest turnover rates tend to be in the catering, retailing and call centre sectors and lowest in the education, legal, accountancy and public sector industries. The impact of high turnover rates in a business will have not only measurable, financial costs including loss of sales and customers, recruitment costs, training and temporary cover especially if a post isn’t filled immediately. However, there are also hidden intangible costs such as poor staff morale that affect those employees remaining in the business.
Positive Employee Recognition This New Year
Yet this high staff turnover trend in the New Year can potentially be turned around in the workplace by ensuring that your staff appreciation program is effective. Employees who feel appreciated are more positive about themselves and their ability to contribute. This in turn boosts employee participation – those people with positive self-esteem are potentially your best employees.
Implementing a company recognition scheme where employees are recognised and rewarded is often regarded as tricky and fraught with fears of employee jealousy and dissatisfaction. This often arises when company recognition schemes are not implemented properly and where the assumption is that one size fits all. A flexible staff appreciation program will acknowledge and reward certain actions, behaviours, approaches and achievements that a company has agreed they wish to foster and reinforce. It is therefore essential to establish employee recognition and rewards opportunities that emphasize and reinforce these sought-after qualities and behaviors within an agreed set of guidelines.
In summary, whilst salary, bonuses, and benefits are critical in your employee recognition and reward system—after all, most employees do work for money—think more broadly about your opportunities to provide employee recognition. A simple thank you or a personalised treat that they can choose themselves might be all they need to stop them registering on those job websites this New Year.
[1] http://eachperson.com/person-reveals-results-employee-survey/ Each Person
[2] http://bit.ly/2hT6uQ3, Monster