Retaining your employees is a challenging and continuous effort. To ensure that your top employees stay on for as long as possible, you need to prioritize maintaining a highly motivated workforce. Doing that is easier said than done, so we have put together a list of the top employee retention tools that will help you hire, train, engage, and, most importantly, retain your top-notch talent.
While ensuring employee retention, you need to select employee retention tools that makes your life simple. Also, ensure to choose tools that cover the whole employee experience at the organization, right from the hiring process to the exit interview. Notably, you need to have hiring & recruiting tools, performance evaluation tools, tools to perform employee surveys, employee rewards tools, and tools for managing employee compensation for high employee retention rates.
Now that we know the basics let us get into specific tools that will go a long way in cutting down on employee churn.
Recruitment Tools
According to a report, effective onboarding can have a significant impact on retaining an employee and reducing the employee turnover costs. So, employers need to prioritize picking candidates with relevant experience, passion, and skillset.
To shortlist suitable candidates, you can rely on software, such as TalentLyft, an applicant tracking system that streamlines communication and makes selection easy.
Once the candidates are shortlisted, you can avail the services of IBM or a company like Predictive Index to assess candidates’ cognitive abilities and skillsets for the role of your choice.
Compensation Tools
Compensation tools are software or platforms designed to assist organizations in managing and analyzing their employee compensation structures. A compensation tool helps HR professionals, compensation managers, and employers make informed decisions regarding employee pay, benefits, and rewards.
These platforms enable companies to automate and streamline their compensation processes. They help with creating and managing pay structures, calculating bonuses and incentives, and ensuring compliance with internal policies and external regulations.
Some of the commonly used compensation tools includes Payfactors, Paycom, Workday, Salary, etc
HR Information System (HRIS) Tools
You need an HRIS if you have anything between 50-500 employees. The HRIS can significantly change every step in the employee life cycle.
When you have a reliable HRIS, you benefit from automating simple responses to employee questions, hiring employees effortlessly, and dealing with requests regarding vacation time, salary, etc.
Here are a few of the top tools in the market that will make the life of an HR manager easy.
- Namely: Provides a centralized platform that mid-size companies can use to handle talent management, payroll, benefits, etc., with intuitive technology. A notable attribute is an emphasis on solutions for employee engagement.
- Ultimate: Allows companies to perform in-depth analytics to improve employee retention efforts and conduct employee surveys, handle payroll, and manage talent effectively.
- Sapling: Developed for fast-growing companies, the software makes onboarding employees and preparing reports a piece of cake. It is also a preferred HRIS for many mid-sized firms.
- hibob: It can be used to build a good workplace culture through engagement. It is also an excellent tool for talent management.
- BambooHR: This is an HR solution that covers almost all aspects of the employee lifecycle. Built for mid-sized firms, the software makes performance management, onboarding, and recruitment pain-free.
Interdepartmental Communication Tools
According to Deloitte, only about 23 percent of executives are convinced that their companies do an excellent job aligning corporate purposes with employee goals, which is a massive failure of communication. If this isn’t addressed, employees will feel their work is meaningless and consequently quit.
Communication isn’t just for conveying corporate goals; it also makes the employee feel appreciated and heard.
To retain employees, companies hence need the right communication tools. Here are a few that we feel are the most impactful.
- Project management tools: Trello and Asana
- Direct messaging and group conversations: Microsoft Teams
- File sharing and communication: Slack
- Recognition platform: Bonusly
Employee Recognition Tools
There is extensive research backing the idea that recognizing employees goes a long way in retaining them. Most notably, a study concluded that 63 percent of employees who are recognized never look for another job.
Another study confirms that a large section of the workforce (around 40%) works with boosted morale if their excellent work is recognized. As a result, the purchase of software for employee recognition is inevitable.
While searching for one, ensure that it can accurately gauge employee satisfaction and relationships. Here are a few that meet those requirements.
- Nectar: Built for companies with up to 1000 employees, the platform is the best for recognition & rewards management.
- Bonusly: It is an online platform for recognizing and celebrating excellent employees. A key feature is analytics that points out the strengths of the employees for everyone to appreciate.
- Assembly: It can effectively integrate with HRIS and communication tools to enable employee appreciation daily. A highlight is that it is pretty user-friendly.
Note that while selecting an employee retention tool that focuses on recognition, you need to ensure:
- High scalability
- It has comprehensive analytics for each employee
- It can provide rewards
- It can be embedded in the workflows seamlessly
Career Development Tools
According to Harvard Business Review, employees tend to stay at a company that offers them a clear career path. The best way to do this is by constantly enhancing your employee’s skillset with development programs. However, to make sure that employees don’t feel stressed due to the new learning requirements, you need to provide them with bite-sized options that are on-demand and easy to use.
You can motivate your employees with skill development opportunities, such as massive open online courses (MOOCs). Here are a few platforms that corporates can use to upskill employees and hone retention rates:
A few HR systems that come with learning management systems (LMS) are as follows:
Employee Survey Tools
Typically, surveys are conducted infrequently or only when an employee decides to leave the company. However, companies need to conduct constant surveys to gauge employee attitudes towards their work, coworkers, and the employer to prevent employee turnover.
A few tools to get comprehensive survey results are SurveyMonkey, Typeform, WorkTango, Officevibe, CultureAmp, etc.
Using these tools, you can get a clear idea of who is likely to leave, how well employees have adjusted to their environment, and how engaged they are.
Employee Experience Tools
Organizations further need employee experience platforms that serve as the front end for the workers to effortlessly interact with the systems that have been put in place to help them. Such a platform is essential because it will enable employees to benefit from all the necessary applications without having to sign into or learn to use all of them.
With the right platform, you can do the following things that are proven to have a positive impact on employee retention:
- Get your brand out to top talent in the market.
- Ensure that the top talent applies to your job postings.
- Boost productivity and engagement levels of the employees by helping them easily access other HR systems from a single platform.
IBM’s AI-powered Watson and ServiceNow can help significantly with enhancing the employee experience.
Employee Wellness Tools
Facilitating employee wellness and making the workforce feel energetic, stress-free, and motivated is a crucial aspect of retention.
One of the most popular tools you can provide to employees for ensuring their mental wellbeing is HeadSpace, an application for meditation and developing focus. The company boasts a 14 percent reduction in burnout with just four sessions.
Fitbit, a smartwatch, is another device that allows companies to hold internal competitions and provide rewards for employees striving to achieve good physical health.
Elevate is an app that helps employees boost brain health, which will translate into higher productivity. The app facilitates the improvement of general cognition, math abilities, language skills, focus, alertness, etc. through interesting games.
Additionally, SleepBot is an app that employees can use to get restful sleep before reaching the office.
Using employee retention tools that foster wellbeing, you can ensure that your workers know when to take breaks, how to work more productively without stress, and how to build nurturing relationships.
Conclusion
While retention is becoming increasingly complex, it is still possible to hold on to your most valuable employees if you use the right tools for hiring and engaging the right people. When the employee retention tools mentioned above are used appropriately, and the HR team acts with a well-defined strategy, you will undoubtedly create a win-win situation for both your company and its employees that cuts down churn rates.
