With many industries facing labor shortages, retaining employees is more critical than ever. COVID-19 changed how many view their relationship with the workplace. Employers must stay up-to-date to retain top talent.
Most employees today feel that jobs need to offer more than just the basics, especially in the wake of significant healthcare concerns.
If you want to compete with other businesses in your industry, you’ll need to create a workplace that caters to the needs of modern employees.
As today’s workforce looks for increased flexibility and work-life balance, here are some tips for increasing employee retention.
Support Working Parents
Working parents make up a significant portion of the workforce and often need more support. The pandemic left many parents struggling to balance their jobs with childcare. Today, parents want more support and flexibility. 43% percent of parents leave the workforce within three months of childbirth.
Luckily, there are some specific ways you can support working and lactating parents and make it easier for them to balance their careers and personal lives. 83% of millennials would change jobs for better family benefits.
Consider these ideas:
- Providing parents with benefits for employee retention. Did you know that parents miss work twice as often when their babies are breastfed? You can increase retention by helping breastfeeding parents get the support they need. Check out how The Lactation Network (TLN)’s Newborn Families program seamlessly integrates into existing benefits and covers lactation care through self-insured health plans.
- Make it easy for breastfeeding parents to work at your company: Create an environment where lactating parents can pump or take necessary breaks. With The Lactation Network Newborn Families programs, working parents can receive breastfeeding support from an International Board of Lactation Consultant through in-person or telehealth consultations.
- Offer generous parental leave: One major issue for parents is parental leave. If you want to attract and retain excellent employees, a generous maternity and paternity leave package is ideal. TLN lactation programs boost post-maternity leave retention from 59% to 92%.
With these three tips, you can better support the parents in your workplace, making it easier for them to remain with your company. With a lactation program, 83% of employees reported higher company satisfaction.
Provide Remote Work Opportunities
Along with flexibility for employees with families, you can better retain all of your top talents by offering increased options for remote work. While working from home isn’t an option for every industry or role, consider how you can integrate remote work when possible.
In businesses where working from home is possible, more and more employees want to have this option.
It’s important to note, you don’t have to move the entire company to fully remote work.
However, you can consider a flex schedule that allows employees to work some days from home and others in the office. At the very least, your employees will appreciate it if you allow them to work from home for mental health days or when family issues arise.
Offer More Days Off
While it’s easy to assume that offering more vacation days will mean lower productivity, this isn’t always the case. When your employees feel burned out or overworked, their productivity will decrease, and so will their job satisfaction. In fact, research shows that more days off makes employees happier and more productive.
If you don’t allow your employees to take time off for sick days or personal reasons, they’ll likely move to a new company with better support.
Consider Providing Better Salaries
Paying a fair wage will likely keep more of your employees around. By making some policy changes to better support employees alongside paying a higher salary, you’ll create a work environment that your employees love.
With these tips in mind, you can improve employee retention where employees, including lactating parents, are supported by their employer and experience more productivity overall.
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