Wondering why your best employees keep walking out the door? It takes more than just money to keep employees happy and engaged. Many organizations underestimate the importance of internal communication, and don’t put enough thought into developing an infrastructure that supports it, such as an intranet and social newsfeeds.
Opinions vary on the topic of what makes employees leave — and how to keep them. According to a survey by human resources company BambooHRthe most common reasons people leave a job fall into these three categories:
- Advancement
- Work-life balance
- Money
“Employees must be valued and respected at work while maintaining a healthy work-life balance or they won’t stay at a job,” according to BambooHR. While the survey infographic identifies a number of deal-breakers, “As long as employees’ pressing needs — empowerment, flexibility in the workplace and fair wages — are met, they’re more willing to tolerate lesser annoyances.”
An article on Forbes.com, meanwhile, offers the following list:
- No vision
- No connection to the big picture
- No empathy
- No (effective) motivation
- No future
- No fun
Whatever your take on the issue, there’s no doubt that employee turnover represents a significant (if often hidden) cost for organizations. The hard costs include things like the cost of recruiting new personnel to replace former employees. But there’s a lot more to consider, according to Inc. Magazine:lost productivity, lost knowledge, increased strain on remaining staff, and the costs of training and interviewing candidates.
The bottom line? It makes good financial sense for organizations to invest in company culture, including technology that supports internal communication and collaboration. Here are three ways that a well-designed corporate intranet serves as a tool for improving engagement and retention:
- Communicating vision: It’s not enough to just post documents that outline your firm’s vision, mission and values. These messages need to be communicated and reinforced over time. A well-designed intranet gives you the tools to regularly communicate with employees and promote conversation about these core values, engaging them via a regularly updated CEO blog, video messages and posts on social feeds, for example.
- Enabling flexibility: Consolidating tools and information into a single, mobile accessible portal allows employees to be productive wherever they are while remaining available and responsive to their colleagues.
An intranet gives your employees increased flexibility by providing integrated instant messaging, video conferencing, online meetings and online document storage that’s available regardless of device or location. This freedom to manage their time and location as they see fit is a great way to improve employee engagement and retention. - Enabling feedback: Another aspect of employee engagement and satisfaction has to do with the amount of empathy they perceive from the company and their managers. Employees need to be heard in an environment where they feel like management is trying to understand them.A corporate intranet could be used to provide various methods for employees to provide feedback and voice their opinions, beyond the standard review sessions with managers. The social feeds available with some intranets make it easy to conduct polls and provide a useful forum for online discussions.
