Employee retention in the workplace is very important, but often overlooked as a top priority for companies. As human resource professionals and company managers, it should be a main goal to recognize issues with employee retention and to make efforts to remedy them.

Here are three tips you can use to retain employees at your company:

1. Work on your culture.

Do what you can to create a positive atmosphere in your workplace and a culture that facilitates long stay careers. Developing a healthy corporate culture and creating a bond within your company will help attract new employees as well as retain existing ones.

Actions that contribute to a positive culture may include: walking around and talking to employees about how their day is going, pointing out the good things they are doing and not just the opportunities for improvement, and/or showing them appreciation regularly either verbally or with small gestures, like providing lunch or a gift card to their favorite place.

2. Hire the right people.

As an HR professional, you need to screen for the right individuals at your company. Weeding out people who are regularly looking for new opportunities is important. There are always bound to be job hoppers seeking employment elsewhere, but hiring the right employees who tend to stay long-term can be far more effective than hiring someone that moves around every few months.

Did your applicant have five jobs in the last two years? Do they appear, contrary to their work history, to be a reliable person with a positive attitude? You can determine these things by checking references, and asking them about why they left previous jobs in the interview (if they answer negatively about someone or something, it does not reflect a positive attitude).

3. Invest in your employees.

Providing training and guidance to produce effective employees is important. As an HR professional, you should be seeking out some of the top programs that could have an effect on your workplace as far as training, career development and guidance go. If you identify a useful program, you should consider recommending it to your workforce so employees will see you are interested in investing in them and their improvement.

Whether training consists of routine refresher courses or the introduction of tasks and applications brand new to them that will broaden their skill set, sending employees to training demonstrates you are supportive of them trying to better themselves.

Consider that replacing your most skilled workers could potentially cost you 30-50 percent more than retaining them. With that in mind, increasing salaries is also a productive means of employee retention. Opting for even a 10 percent salary increase request is much cheaper than hiring someone with the same level of experience and giving them negotiating power.

About Kellie Boysen – Owner, Alternative HR:

Kellie Boysen is a certified Professional in Human Resources (PHR) with more than a decade of HR experience. She owns Alternative HR, a local human resource consulting and outsourcing organization that is dedicated to providing small business owners with an affordable alternative to hiring a full-time HR professional.