How to reduce employee turnover through learning

Explore key ways L&D can boost staff retention and reduce employee turnover for your organisation.

Recruitment is expensive. Notice periods, handovers and training new starters are all disruptive. While there are measures you can take to mitigate all of those factors, it’s far better to keep employee turnover as low as possible.

So how do you achieve that? Increased salaries, better benefits and nice perks will inevitably be among the main considerations for keeping people in your company. But there are other cost-effective, practical steps  — many of which involve learning — you can take to retain your employees.

In this article, we will explore the measures you can implement to reduce employee turnover through learning.

Helping new starters settle

If new starters never really feel settled within your organisation, that creates an unhelpful churn of talent who leave within a matter of months. An effective onboarding process can help people hit the ground running and make them feel at home.

An intuitive LMS course that tells new employees all the important information they need to know, from how to perform key tasks essential to their role to where they can get a cup of coffee, can help people to settle more quickly.

Many of our customers, such as East Midlands Ambulance Service, give new hires access to their LMS before their official start date so they can start familiarising themselves with what to expect. It’s by no means compulsory, but it can settle nerves and prevent that fish-out-of-water feeling for some employees.

See more about using an LMS for onboarding.

Building a solid foundation in early careers

Your learning programme can take new starters — especially school leavers and graduates — and put them on the right track for a long and successful career within the organisation. 

Investing in development early in their employment can not only build loyalty and a strong affinity with the organisation, but also equip them with the skills that they and the organisation will need in the years to come.

Investing in development

There is a growing demand for personal and professional development among today’s workforce. Meeting — or even surpassing — those expectations is a very efficient and cost-effective way of reducing employee turnover.

Using your LMS to upskill your people benefits them and the organisation. They feel valued and that you’re investing in them. At the same time, they’re developing new skills that they can bring to their role.

Supporting career development

How much of your employee turnover is due to someone seeking a more senior role elsewhere? Your learning and development programme can minimise that by supporting career progression for your employees.

It can do this in several ways. The first is automated learning pathways — based on roles, experience or conversations with the employee — that equip them with the skills they need to progress either to the next logical step in their career or towards the role they really want.

Secondly, it can inform your recruitment processes. Using your LMS reporting system — and external tools if needed — can save time and money by finding internal recruitment candidates for vacancies or proactively earmarking in-house talent for future promotions.

Thirdly, it can help to clarify each employee’s thoughts around skills and competencies by laying them out in black and white. This supports self-reflection and indicates areas in which employees can improve or expand their skills to achieve career progression. 

Make people feel valued and it will make them want to stay.

Nurturing connections and culture

Professional relationships and the wider organisational culture play an important role in making your organisation somewhere people want to work. Your LMS has a range of tools that can encourage interactions, build connections and establish a workplace culture.

Forums, Slack integrations, collaborative spaces and action learning tasks are just a handful of ways your LMS can bring your team closer together. By increasing those interactions, building relationships and developing a shared culture, the risk of employee turnover is reduced significantly.

Rewarding employees

Sharing badges, awards and certificates for learning achievements is a proven way of increasing staff morale and showing that you’re investing in their development and career progression.

You can enhance this by bringing an element of gamification to your learning. Create some friendly competition within your LMS and reward the employees who perform best. This could be in the form of a prize, extra annual leave or another perk.

It’s a bit of fun, has real-world benefits for the employee and encourages engagement with L&D — a recipe for a workplace with low employee turnover.

Talk to us about reducing employee turnover

If you’re interested in using learning to reduce employee turnover and improve staff retention at your organisation, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch soon.

Tags