Retaining Employees Essay, Research Paper

An important factor in retaining employees that is sometimes highly overlooked is making the employee feel that they make a difference, and the rewarding of exceptional employee performance. When searching for employment almost everyone looks for salary, benefits, and other perks but more recently another important factor is job satisfaction. According to American Management Association ? Recent surveys by The Business Research Lab, Hauppauge, NY, which specializes in employee satisfaction measurement studies, infer there?s a correlation between reward/recognition programs and whether people intend to stay at their place of employment?

To retain employees employers must develop a system of rewards for employee achievements. One way to do this is an ?Employee of the Month? program. This would recognize an employee?s hard work for that time period. Benefits of this award could include a gift certificate to a local restaurant and a designated parking spot for that month. Another way to reward employees would be by performance bonuses. Simply this could be a monetary reward for those individuals performing in the top percentage of their department. Also many times employees feel distanced from management and the rules and regulations structuring their jobs. To overcome this employers should allow employees to input ideas into company policy reducing the gap between employee and employer. Implementing such ideas as these and others would not only increase employee retention but also employee performance.

According to an article in Workforce ?The National Association for Employee Recognition has found that human resource professionals and managers still underestimate how recognition can better motivate employees to achieve business goals.? It is very important to be concerned about employee satisfaction and make efforts to increase satisfaction for several reasons. One is that employees tend to perform better when there are incentives involved. The cost of any such programs would be offset drastically by the increase in performance resulting in increased profit. Those employees who feel that they personally make a difference tend to work harder and perform better as opposed to an employee who feels lost in the system. Another incentive in increasing employee satisfaction is that a more satisfied an employee is in their job the longer they are likely to continue employment in that company.