Six top tips to support staff retention

Once you’ve recruited the right people, it’s important to keep them. We’ve rounded up some top tips to help you retain staff and lower turnover.

1. Create a positive workplace culture

Creating a positive workplace culture is key in ensuring your staff are happy at work. If they’re happy, they’re more likely to stay with you long-term, and we know that organisations with a positive culture, who value their workforce and provide a great place to work, have good retention rates.

Things you can do to help create a positive workplace culture include consulting your staff about your organisation’s values and whether these are felt throughout the typical working day, and taking steps to make sure these are embedded into the organisation such as creating a staff handbook and reviewing processes to make sure they align with your values and culture. You can find practical guidance and activities to support with this in our ‘positive culture toolkit for adult social care’.

You can find out more about workplace culture with our #PositiveWorkplaceCulture spotlight.

2. Provide good leadership and management

Leaders and managers are key in supporting staff retention. Not only are they a large contributor to developing and maintaining a positive workplace culture, but they also play an important role in making staff feel valued and supported at work.

It's important to make sure managers at all levels are equipped with the skills and knowledge they need to be effective people managers who can support staff with all elements of their work – whether that's helping with practical skills or being open to speak to about challenges.

Have a look at our support for leaders and managers.

3. Support staff development

People who are offered learning and development opportunities are more likely to stay with employers. Our data tells us investing in learning and development reduces the average turnover rate for care workers to 31.7% amongst those that received some form of training compared to 41.2% amongst those that hadn’t.

Our Secrets of Success report also found that staff learning was one of the most important aspects for staff retention.

Providing opportunities for development and progression in your organisation makes staff feel more valued and motivated and allows them to create a future with your organisation.

Support staff development by discussing career and learning goals at regular staff appraisals, ensuring staff know what learning and progression opportunities are available to them, and working with training providers to offer regular training to staff.

Find out more about developing your workforce.

4. Offer good benefits and terms and conditions

Research, including our Secrets of Success report, shows that good working conditions, such as guaranteed working hours, fair wages, flexibility, input into rotas and help with childcare costs are important to employees and impact on staff retention.

These are factors which can be incorporated into your terms and conditions and benefits package.

Employers who have a lower staff turnover go beyond the minimum requirements for these areas. Engage your staff to understand what benefits and improvements in terms and conditions would support and retain them, using this to tailor your benefits package.

5. Support staff wellbeing

Positive workplaces support the personal and professional wellbeing of their staff. This includes supporting a good work/life balance, addressing workplace stress, and increasing staff resilience.

Ways to support staff wellbeing can include providing visible leadership and encouraging open and honest communication between staff, offering flexible working options to suit people’s personal needs, and implementing wellbeing champions in your team who lead on supporting the wellbeing strategy in your organisation.

Find out more about supporting wellbeing.

6. Show appreciation with rewards and recognition

Everyone likes to be acknowledged and appreciated for a job well done. Our research has found that celebrating achievements can go a long way to improving staff retention, as well as increasing staff satisfaction and performance.

You can provide rewards and recognition to staff in a number of ways. This could be through private or public feedback to say thank you and provide praise, or through providing a reward such as additional holiday, a voucher, or a staff event. Many organisations enjoy regular company awards to celebrate their staff’s achievements.

The app Care Friends also allows you to reward staff with points which can be redeemed for cash.

You can find more tips and advice to support staff retention with our top tips for retention guide.

View more articles and information about recruitment and retention with our #RecruitRight spotlight.

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