Retaining top-performing employees is quite important for businesses. It helps minimize various costs and maintain high productivity levels within teams. But, it can sometimes be challenging to improve employee retention. Companies across the globe use different strategies to achieve this goal. Many of these involve dedicated tools or outsourcing the firm’s staff retention efforts entirely.

Today, we’ll explore one of these strategies for improving employee retention. But, it uses a tool that your business likely already takes advantage of: time tracking software.

How to improve employee retention with time tracking

Time tracking software can help businesses in many ways. Let’s explore how it can assist your company in improving employee retention.

Manage time optimally

One of the greatest causes of high turnover is low employee engagement. It affects staff retention in many ways, which we’ll explore more in-depth a bit later. But, a great way of increasing professional engagement is by helping your team manage their work hours. Time tracking software is excellent for this purpose. It will help your staff prioritize and complete tasks on time. This will increase your team’s productivity and provide your business with many other benefits. You can get started with this by tracking time with a browser time tracker, such as the WebWork web tracker. To take advantage of more advanced monitoring features, you can install its desktop tracker app on your company’s computers.

Recognize staff efforts with productivity reports

Recognizing the efforts and achievements of employees is vital for staff retention. Professionals who don’t get recognized for their work often struggle to feel a sense of purpose in their roles. This is among the key drivers of low engagement rates, which you must avoid to improve employee retention. Thankfully, recognizing your team’s efforts is easier with a time tracking solution. A high-quality app like WebWork can provide you with lots of data on the productivity of your employees. You should then use this to reward the best performers of your company and celebrate team milestones.

Dedicate time to collaboration

Ensuring close collaboration is another important step in improving staff retention. It is vital in improving employee engagement and can even help professionals develop their skills. This is because your team members can provide each other with constructive feedback when working together. As a result, your professionals will perform better, leading to an increase in output quality for your organization. You can enhance your staff’s collaboration efforts by dedicating more time to such tasks. You can then use the productivity reports of a solution like WebWork to ensure positive results.

Why is employee retention important?

Having explored how you can improve employee retention, let’s now look at the core concept itself. Specifically, why is staff retention important for a business?

Save hiring resources

One of the key ways improved employee retention can help companies is with talent acquisition. According to research, it can cost a business between 50% and 60% of a professional’s annual salary to replace them. These costs come from a variety of sources, including internal and third-party recruiters, new staff training, and reduced business productivity. By improving employee retention, you’ll be able to avoid these costs at your company.

Easier to ensure work quality

Another benefit of retaining existing employees relates to the quality of their work. It can be challenging to ensure that a potential new hire will be a good fit for a team. Because of this, retaining existing employees is a much safer path for your organization. Replacing top-performing professionals will be even harder, underscoring the importance of staff retention.

Save payroll resources

Payroll savings is a lesser-known benefit of a good employee retention rate. As professionals continue job hopping in search of higher salaries, those who stay at a company for longer are likely to earn less. Your business can use this to its advantage to save resources in the long run. But, it is important to not take advantage of this too much, as low salaries are among the top drivers of high turnover rates. Conveniently, this is our next point of discussion.

What can cause high employee turnover?

Let’s now explore the causes of high turnover rates, starting with the aforementioned low salaries.

Low pay

Among the major reasons why professionals seek new jobs is to get an increase in their pay. Employees often view salaries as indicators of how valued their work is in their teams. Low salaries can save business resources in the short term. But, in the long run, they will cost your company far more in talent acquisition and training costs.

Lacking career growth

Apart from pay, professionals often look for many other job perks as well. This includes career growth opportunities, which provide many benefits of their own. Consequently, a healthy career growth path will incentivize employees to remain in their positions. Helping your team grow in their careers can also improve your organization’s performance. Because of this, you should consider providing such opportunities to your staff. These can include professional training and learning experiences.

Subpar benefits

Continuing on the topic of benefits, traditional examples like insurance can also be important. While they may seem insignificant, employees can value certain workplace perks quite highly. If your company has the resources, you should certainly consider offering a variety of benefits to your team. 

No recognition

As mentioned previously, recognition plays a major role in professional engagement. Employees who don’t feel rewarded for their efforts will not be invested in their roles. This will lead to them looking for better opportunities outside of their current workplaces, increasing turnover.

Burnout

Burnout is a popular driver of turnover across the globe. It stems from overworking and an unhealthy work-life balance. Burnout affects both professionals and their employers negatively, leading to many side effects. These are especially harmful to employees, as overworking can affect their health in both the short and long run.

How else can a time tracker help your business?

Besides helping you improve employee retention, time-tracking software can provide many other benefits. To close off this article, let’s briefly look at how else a time tracker can assist your business.

Remote and hybrid work arrangements

In the past few years, remote and hybrid working has exploded in popularity. As more professionals demand such arrangements, it is important that your business can offer them. Time tracking apps can help you with this in lots of ways. A high-quality solution like WebWork can provide you with a lot of data. This will allow you to maintain your team’s productivity levels after they transition to working from home. Consequently, you’ll be able to offer such working arrangements with confidence.

Flexible working schedules

Flexible working schedules are somewhat similar to remote working arrangements. They provide professionals with a greater degree of freedom than traditional schedules. But, flexible work hours can have even greater positive effects. With such schedules, employees can work when they’re most productive. The role of time trackers in implementing flexible work hours is pretty simple. You can use tracking software to ensure that your team works an appropriate amount of hours.

Better work-life balance

Time tracking software is an excellent tool for ensuring a healthy work-life balance. Besides helping reduce overworking, they can also prevent employees from working at unhealthy times of the day. Using a high-quality solution like WebWork, your staff will even be able to set up periodic wellness reminders for themselves.

Final thoughts

Time tracking software can help businesses improve employee retention in several ways. They help ensure high professional engagement, which is vital to achieving low turnover. Besides improving employee retention, time trackers are also beneficial for many other reasons. All these combine to make trackers an important tool for leaders who want to take their companies to the next level.