What is retention and why is it important?

Through October and November, we’ll be focusing on information and resources to support social care employers with retention, as we launch our #RetainToGain spotlight.

 We’ll be shining a light on the different tools, resources, and projects we have available to help you retain staff, as well as sharing new blogs and articles over the next couple of months focused on top tips for retention, interviews with social care thought-leaders, and guest blogs from colleagues in the sector about how they manage retention.

What is retention?

Retention is about creating a strong and loyal workforce who stay with your organisation for the long-term.

It’s beneficial to have strong retention rates with low turnover rates, as it reduces the time and money spent on recruitment, creates a skilled and committed workforce, and serves as an indicator that you’ve created a positive place to work.

Why is retention important in social care?

Having high levels of retention among your team is important for all organisations, across any sector.

Recruiting and on-boarding staff costs time and money, so you want to ensure that time and money is well-invested by creating a team member who will stay with you long-term and grow with you. This means they’ll continue to add value to your organisation as they continually develop their skills and a comprehensive understanding of your organisation and service. It can also mean increased commitment and motivation due to a sense of loyalty. Crucially, this means you’re not regularly spending time and money recruiting, on-boarding, and training new people.

Having high retention rates can also help create a strong team bond as everyone in the team is familiar and comfortable working together, which can mean better communication and trust between team members, as well as a more enjoyable working environment.

In social care, retention is very important. Creating a loyal workforce which is dedicated to your service, and continuing to grow and upskill with you, means you can offer better care to the people you support.

There’s going to be a growing demand for social care in the future – our data estimates that for the social care sector to grow proportionately to the number of people aged 65+, we’ll need almost half a million more jobs in the sector by 2035.

That’s why it’s absolutely vital that as well as recruiting new people into the sector, we retain our existing and new social care workers.

What can employers do to support retention?

There are some key areas which employers can focus on to support retention, and this is what our #RetainToGain spotlight will focus on. These include:

• running a comprehensive induction programme which embeds new recruits in your team right away
• investing in learning and development to keep your team invested in their role and feeling valued
• creating a positive workplace culture and providing wellbeing support to ensure staff are happy at work
• providing regular supervision and good management so that staff are well-supported and confident in their roles
• establishing organisational values and hiring people who match these values, so that staff are invested in your mission and feel they’re a right fit for your team
• ensuring your registered managers feel connected and supported to keep staff in this crucial role on-board.

Retention support and resources

You can find our key retention support and resources on our #RetainToGain spotlight page, including information on learning and development and funding to support this, tools to help support staff wellbeing, information on embedding values, and support for registered managers.

We’ll also be adding new blogs and articles providing advice and insights on retention throughout October and November.

Find all of this on our #RetainToGain spotlight.

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