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Every week in my role at Thrive I engage with organisations where high levels of staff turnover of 30% or more are really hurting businesses across a wide range of sectors. Just pause for a moment and imagine roughly a third of the people in your organisation regularly changing over and the impact that would have in terms of lost productivity, low morale, constant recruitment and training - the cost to business is massive.
It's no wonder that organisations are seeking to explore any and all options to reduce employee turnover, leading to the question I often get asked...
"Will an employee engagement app reduce staff turnover?"
The short answer is "Yes!", followed swiftly by "but only if you also get to the root of the problem and do something about it!" It can be a tough message to hear, but deep down I think everyone appreciates there is no individual silver bullet to solve this tricky challenge. An app alone (or any tech come to that) is not the only answer in the same way as paying a disgruntled employee more money will only delay the inevitable - all the other problems won't go away and more than likely they'll leave later on anyway. Low pay can of course be part of the problem but the solution is all about understanding what's happening overall and then addressing the issues to get the balance right. The good news is, an employee app can help you do that.
Open up the lines of communication
In my experience employee turnover is often highest in sectors such as retail, healthcare, manufacturing, facilities management where communication is normally limited to the individuals direct line manager and their team mates. Poor communication and the organisation being perceived to not listen and solve problems on the ground is often cited as one the major frustrations in this context. An employee app, available to download onto your own personal mobile phone (not just company provided phones), can open up the lines of communication to each and every employee. The act of making such an app generally available in itself is a major statement on the part of the organisation that it wants to improve the culture and invest in the employees, but of course it's only the first step.
Ask employees for feedback
One of the first tasks we always encourage organisations to do is to ask employees for feedback - what do they like and dislike today? What's working well and where is there room for improvement? Last but not least - do they have any ideas or suggestions to improve things? Annual surveys are antiquated and not a tool of these times - most organisations I engage with have dumped them already in favour of pulse surveys & focus groups. It's great to ask these questions in person if you can, but if your organisation is geographically spread out across lots of locations this can be tough, so you can use the app to rapidly ask for feedback and start to have a two-way conversation with every part of your organisation remotely. Push notifications are a great tool to ask employees for their views.
Show people that your are listening and responding
Once you have gathered some meaningful feedback and formulated your responses, you can use the app to communicate to employees and invite further feedback and discussion - an app is all about facilitating the discussion and keeping focused on the issues in hand. It's likely that you will want to give a mixture of responses from quick action where the answer is obvious and you can act immediately, to more complex issues that will take some time to resolve, or indeed where you need more input from the employees. The app can't magically answer the questions on your behalf, but it will certainly give you the platform to have the discussion and perhaps unearth clever ideas and potential solutions from within your workforce that would otherwise go unheard.
So in summary with a little persistence and work, an employee engagement app will help you get to the heart of your turnover issues, discover new ideas from within and will ensure all your employees are kept in the loop as you solve the underlying issues.
If your organisation is suffering from high levels of staff turnover we would be delighted to help with an employee app - as part of the solution.
