The engineering and technical industries can be tough enough to recruit for, but when there is frequent employee turnover, it becomes an uphill battle. Employee turnover is often a symptom of several things, most of which can be corrected with the right strategy. Learn how to win the war for talent by stopping turnover in its tracks.
Evaluate your current compensation structure
According to the PayScale Compensation Best Practices report for this year, the number-one reason why employees leave is for better pay. If you are not offering enough in terms of salary and benefits to your engineering and technical teams, they will be looking for other jobs in short order. Use current salary data for your company, and improve the starting salary and the merit structure for all your employees.
Scan through previous exit interview notes
You can learn a lot about turnover from past employees who have mentioned salary during exit interviews. Read through a handful of these exit interviews (with the HR manager) and see what reasons were given. Then take steps to improve these areas in the business to prevent more employees from leaving.
Review all your job descriptions carefully
It could be a good time to review all of your job descriptions to make sure employees are not burdened with tasks they should not be doing. This can lead to burnout and frustration. You may need to reassign some tasks to the right people, and create new positions to handle some of these tasks more efficiently.
Understand what makes people stay
Send out a confidential employee satisfaction survey to find out what employees like about working for your company and what they don’t like. Encourage managers to get full participation from employees. Use this data to improve the workplace and retain more people.
Give employees career development support
Many employees choose to leave companies because they do not feel they can go any higher in terms of their career growth. They leave “dead end” jobs for more challenging roles with other companies. This is a huge value for engineering and tech employees. Make sure your company has a system for promoting people and supporting their learning goals.
Make the work environment better
The work environment itself may be depressing, unsafe, or just uninspiring, which is causing engineering and technical employees to quit. Conduct a full audit of the property, making corrections to hazards, updating work areas and break rooms, and reducing clutter in common work areas. This can help to boost employee morale enough to make more people stay.
