If you run a small business, you need to be able to retain good employees. Losing employees can cost you a lot of time, money and skill, but how exactly do you keep those great employees you’ve managed to find? You offer them job satisfaction that’s how.

By keeping your employees fully engaged in their work, you can keep them happy and motivated so that they are far more likely to stick around and help you build your business. Okay, but how do you keep them engaged?

Have Vision

Having a vision for your business and sharing that vision with your employees will ensure that you all have a roadmap to follow with definite goals in sight and enough motivation to keep you all moving forward.

Meet Your Employees Needs

If you want to keep your employees engaged, you need to treat them all as individuals and ensure that they each have the tools THEY need to work effectively. That might mean enrolling one member of staff on a course at Rockford Career College so they can improve their competency in IT or meeting one-to-one with another employee for a debrief after a project, for example, but it should be tailored to what they need, not what you think they need, so listen carefully to them.

Communication Is Key

Employees rarely feel valued if their voices are not heard and if they do not have much of a dialogue with their managers or the boss. That’s why you should not only schedule regular short and relevant meetings, but you should also make a point of asking staff for their suggestions on a range of issues, and you should definitely keep them posted about any changes to the business or their work as soon as you know about them.

Let Them Take the Lead

Do away with micromanaging and trust your employees enough to plan their own working day and complete their projects without too much interference. If you’ve hired competent people, they will be able to handle it, and being in control of their own work will give them increased motivation to succeed.

Offer a Better Work/Life Balance

Employees who are worked too hard tend to become resentful, and they probably aren’t as efficient as they could be anyway, so why not make things easier for them by giving them more time off? Doing so will probably see your productivity soar while engaging your employees more, it’s a win-win situation.

Be Fair

It’s important that you treat all of your employees absolutely fairly. A failure to do so might motivate and engage those employees who you favor, but the rest of your team will start to disengage because, after all, what’s the point in working hard when you don’t get any of the reward?

Reward Them

Last, but certainly not least, you should always reward employees for a good job done. Whether you take them out for dinner or pay them a bonus, showing them you appreciate what they do is a sure-fire way to increase motivation.

Engage your employees and keep them for longer!