Two female HR coworkers discuss strategies to reduce high turnover rates

Five Strategies to Reduce High Turnover Rates

More than two years since the Great Resignation took the world by storm, HR leaders still have their hands full trying to keep their teams together.

More than eight in 10 global organizations (83%) say they face significant talent retention challenges, according to a recent survey. What’s more, their struggles line up with employee attitudes: 73% of United States workers say they are actively considering quitting in 2023.

There is good news, though. By taking the right steps, you can improve your ability to capture and retain talent today—and set up your company for sustained success tomorrow.

Learn why turnover is particularly painful for employers right now and five things HR leaders like you can do to overcome it.

The High Costs of High Turnover

As an HR professional, you’re all too familiar with how turnover negatively impacts your company’s performance and bottom line.

  • Every year, U.S. businesses lose approximately $1 trillion to employee turnover. [Gallup]
  • Replacing a lost employee can cost up to 75% of that employee's annual salary. [SHRM]

The consequences of turnover are especially pronounced in today’s tight labor market for two reasons. First, employers are dealing with severe talent shortages around the world. Secondly, employees with highly sought-after skills are more likely to leave their jobs, making competition fierce when you need to backfill roles.

  • 9.6 million job openings existed in the U.S. as of March 2023, leaving 1.6 million open roles for every available worker. [CNBC]
  • One in two CHROs says their retention problems are limited to high-demand roles. [PRNewswire]

These conditions make your job more difficult than it already is. While you have to fight harder to find the talent you need to fill open roles, your workforce also takes on extra pressure. This creates a vicious cycle: Overworked talent is at increased risk of low engagement and burnout, creating even more work for other employees. As a result, workforce morale decreases while the likelihood of churn increases.

Let’s dive into five steps you can take to improve talent attraction and retention in the face of high turnover.

Strategy 1: Increase Employee Referral Bonuses

Sourcing talent and identifying qualified candidates is a long, painstaking process. Make your job easier by leaning on your employees.

When you leverage current employees to send you referrals, they often recommend candidates they know and trust through previous work experience. Because these candidates are pre-vetted, they bring a sense of confidence that you don’t immediately receive from job seekers outside your network.

One easy way to get your current talent to send you more referrals? Offer them more lucrative employee referral bonuses. While your talent will already want to send you quality referrals, offering an extra financial incentive will only increase the number of referrals they forward.

When Mastercard increased its employee referral bonus by up to 3x, it increased the number of referrals received through applications by 4x. [PRNewswire]

Strategy 2: Help Talent Grow Within Your Company

One of the surest ways to keep your talent—and keep them happy—is to give them room to grow within your company.

Employees often switch jobs to advance their career prospects. As many as 64% of U.S. workers (and 75% of employees under the age of 34) believe that moving to a new job benefits their long-term career success. You can negate that reason for job hopping by making it easier for employees to grow within your own organization.

Enabling upward mobility means your people get the best of both worlds—the familiarity and comfort that comes from consistency and the increased skills, salary, and responsibility from jumping into a new role.

Setting up a pathway of internal growth should not be confused with quiet hiring, in which you add to an employee’s responsibilities without offering a promotion or pay bump. While promoting employees gives them more reason to stay with you, quiet hiring might cause them to leave, as 27% of employees would consider quitting if they were quiet-hired.

However, if you clearly communicate with employees that their new responsibilities are a test run as they work toward a promotion, you can use quiet hiring as an intermediary step toward helping them grow within your organization.

Here are three more strategies you can use to help employees internally advance their careers:

  • Create an internal learning platform. Make it easy for your employees to learn the new skills they need to take the next step in their careers—and become more valuable to your company.
  • Reimburse for career advancement. Encourage your employees to enhance their knowledge and expertise by offering them a budget for external learning courses.
  • Communicate and check in often. Talk to your talent regularly about their goals and future plans so you can identify internal growth opportunities and create a roadmap for how to get there.

Strategy 3: Launch an In-House Staffing Agency

Employee referrals aren’t the only way you can leverage internal resources to attract new candidates. Creating an in-house staffing agency allows you to source talent directly, giving you another tool to recruit job seekers within your network.

Consider all the qualified talent you’ve screened, evaluated, and interviewed in the past but couldn’t hire because you either didn’t have an opening or decided to go with another candidate. When you create an internal agency, you keep these candidates in your network so you can quickly and easily pivot to them when needed.

Launching an in-house staffing agency also increases your ability to hire the right people for your culture, which helps boost engagement and retention down the road.

“Companies really need to lean on internal staffing agencies rather than just third-party recruiters,” Velocity Global Chief People and Culture Officer Linda Lee said. “They need a talent acquisition team that understands and can explain the culture since culture is what brings people in and keeps them loyal and engaged.”

Turning to an internal agency also helps you minimize the wait and costs of hiring a third-party recruiter to find talent for you. You can reinvest those savings in your current workforce through raises, bonuses, career development opportunities, and other employee-friendly resources that boost your ability to retain talent.

Strategy 4: Make It Easy for Your Talent to Work Anywhere

The age of remote work is here, and talent wants the ability to do their jobs anywhere, whether at their kitchen table, in a co-working space across the globe, or anywhere in between.

  • 9 out of 10 remote workers want to retain remote work to some degree. [Gallup]
  • 53% of employees say that they would consider staying at their current company longer if it had a long-term remote work policy. [Qualtrics]
  • 52% of U.S. workers say they would take a pay cut to have the freedom to choose where they work. [Owl Labs]

Want to learn more about talent’s quickly changing priorities so you can attract and retain the best? Download our Future of Work: What Talent Wants guide now.

Making it easy for your people to work anywhere brings many advantages. First, it helps you meet an emerging expectation for top talent worldwide. As a result, it increases your ability to attract and retain in-demand job seekers who have their pick of employers to choose from.

It also helps you deliver on other priorities for talent: flexibility and work-life balance. When talent does not have to report to a brick-and-mortar office, they have more control over when, where, and how they do their jobs—enabling them to adopt flexible hours and balance work with life.

Even better, offering the ability to work from anywhere helps you retain talent that wants to move. Historically, relocation has been a huge driver of attrition because employers could not retain talent moving to a new city or country. Offering the ability to work anywhere, however, means you can keep your people employed wherever they go, so you never have to lose talent due to relocation again.

Allowing talent to work anywhere may seem challenging, but it’s easier than you think when you work with an employer of record (EOR). Your EOR partner handles compliance, local benefits, payroll, and day-to-day HR support, so you can let people work anywhere without increasing your workload. Find out how working with an EOR makes it easy for your talent to take their jobs across borders.

Strategy 5: Boost Your Total Rewards Strategy

It’s no secret that talent prioritizes benefits. What might come as a surprise, though, is how many employers don’t meet their expectations.

While 66% of employees say comprehensive benefits packages are a must-have, only 31% of employers plan to offer comprehensive packages to attract and retain top talent. That’s good news for you. By making benefits a core part of your total rewards strategy, you can capitalize on a key priority for talent—and gain an edge over employers that don’t.

Offering better benefits also helps keep employees healthy, which is a win-win for your workforce and your company.

Holistically healthy employees are:

  • 59% more likely to feel engaged
  • 53% more likely to be productive
  • 51% more likely to continue working for you in one year [Metlife]

When boosting your total rewards packages, better benefits are just the start. Additional opportunities include:

  • Global equity awards. Give your talent an ownership stake in your company so they have more reason to invest in its success and stick around for the long haul.
  • Flexible workspaces. Boost your employee experience and watch workforce productivity and retention rates rise by letting your talent access state-of-the-art workspaces worldwide.
  • Unlimited paid time off (PTO). As talent wants more balance of life and work, they expect the freedom to take time off when they need it. Give them what they need—and gain a powerful tool for attraction and retention—by offering them unlimited paid time off.

Overcome Retention Challenges With an Expert Partner

Overcoming high turnover is no small feat. But HR leaders like you have the power to attract and retain top talent by executing the right strategies. Working with the right partner makes the entire process significantly easier.

Velocity Global has helped more than 1,000 companies hire and support talent worldwide since 2014. With employment solutions and expertise in more than 185 countries, we offer you the ability to boost talent attraction and retention by:

  • Letting your people work from anywhere
  • Hiring top job seekers worldwide—turning your hiring pool into an ocean
  • Offering talent the comprehensive benefits, equity awards, and flexible workspaces they want
  • Providing an exceptional employee experience with on-time payroll, fast HR support, and more

“It’s great to have all the growth in the world, but if talent leaves after six months, it’s a huge strain on the business. It’s extremely important we choose the right partner for hiring internationally. Velocity Global does the best job at that.”

—David Andreasson, VP of Finance and Operations, Paige

Find out how Paige leans on Velocity Global to capture and retain top talent worldwide.

Want to learn more about how we can help you rise above the challenges of high turnover? Get in touch with one of our global employment experts today.

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