The Leadership Insider network is an online community where the most thoughtful and influential people in business contribute answers to timely questions about careers and leadership. Today’s answer to the question “How do you keep your best employees?” is by Niraj Shah, CEO of Wayfair.
Employees are the backbone of any organization, but a company’s best employees are crucial to its overall success. Yet retaining them is often put on the back burner. Even losing just one of your best employees can have a huge impact on the business. Here are three key things that every company can do to help build stronger teams and retain its best employees:
Keep employees challenged
Valuable employees are going to be valuable no matter where they choose to work. So your job as a business owner, CEO, or manager is to make sure your employees are constantly learning. Make sure your employees are increasing their value to the company, in addition to building their career skills. This is not only valuable for the employer, but the employee as well. Ambitious employees will want to remain innovative so create opportunities for them to work on new initiatives. If they can develop new skills at your company, an offer to work elsewhere will be less appealing. For example, Wayfair offers a wide range of in-person and online trainings courses to keep employees actively learning and up-to-date in their respective fields.
Make work fun
When your employees are out amongst friends, they don’t want to be the one person that hates going to work–no one does. Culture is an important aspect in terms of retaining employees. Whether having fun means a casual dress code, summer hours, or celebrating milestones, providing a balance is necessary. At Wayfair, employees are encouraged to participate in pod outings, which are funded by the company and give teams a chance to spend time outside of the office together once a month. Teams can go bowling, out to dinner, or do any other team oriented activity they want and Wayfair will pick up the tab. Offer recreational sports or interest-based groups. The point here is simple: make sure people enjoy coming to work every day.
Reward and recognize
All employees want to be acknowledged for their hard work. When most people think of incentives, monetary ones are the first to come to mind. While monetary rewards are an important incentive, there are other ways to keep your best employees satisfied. We built a “Recognition Wall” on our internal website at Wayfair. This is where any employee can be recognized and the entire company is able to see. Create a variety of ways for your employees to see just how valuable they are to the organization.
