Covid-19 has challenged everything we thought we knew about our economy, education system, and the labor market. As millions of people faced unemployment in recent months, businesses had to come to grips with a new reality of managing a fully remote workforce and keeping productivity and performance levels as unaffected by the pandemic as possible.

However, despite the uncertainty and the sharp increase in redundancies, businesses are still struggling with keeping their voluntary employee turnover down—in other words, employees are quitting.

The pandemic has shaken up a lot of aspects of how we do business, and as such, has inspired people to re-evaluate their careers and use this tumultuous time to seek new, better opportunities.

Employers are now facing a new kind of challenge: for the first time, they are required to invest as much in retaining their employees as they are in attracting them in the first place. Gallup reports that voluntary employee turnover costs the U.S. market alone around $1 trillion a year, or anywhere between one-half to two times the employee’s salary. Add to this the additional cost of job ads, recruitment, and onboarding, and losing an employee can quickly become an unaffordable expense for most businesses.

The reasons behind people’s desire to change jobs are manifold

Even before the tectonic shifts brought on by the pandemic, the advent of the internet and the proliferation of digital jobs meant that people had the flexibility to choose the type of work they do and the location they do it from.

People are no longer bound by the opportunities available in their local job market.

Young professionals have access to better education which makes them better equipped to fulfill multiple roles and are more aware of the various opportunities they can pursue. Harvard Business Review reports that external hires into a company often have 18–20% higher salaries than their peers who had been internally promoted to the same role. This can be an incentive for a lot of people to seek promotion and better pay elsewhere.

Millennials, who by 2030 are expected to make up 75% of the labor market, are particularly prone to job-hopping, 43% of whom say they want to change jobs every 2 years (the overall average time being about 8 years). They are also more likely to seek self-employment and flexible work conditions over other traditional job perks like security and promotion. This makes them a rather unique group of workers, one that employers often struggle to understand and retain.

Considering the financial implications from losing employees, HR and L&D departments are racing against time to come up with good retention measures that will meet the needs of the ever-growing millennial workforce and will simultaneously protect the business interests.

Here are four effective and relatively inexpensive things businesses can do to entice the growing millennial workforce to stick around for longer.

Invest in quality onboarding

Many businesses don’t give onboarding too much thought, not because they don’t want to, but because there are so many competing priorities that this often falls to the sideline. This is particularly true for smaller businesses that have to invest all their time and effort into bringing in new revenue that new employees are often given very little if any, time to adjust to the new working environment.

Lack of appropriate onboarding can be costly though. Employees who aren’t given enough attention at the beginning are much more likely to leave later on.

SHRM, the human resource management association, estimates that onboarding needs to take at least one year in order to truly have an impact on retention.

Not only that, but giving employees the essentials like access to the building, laptop, internet passwords, etc. on day one significantly improves their perception of their new workplace.

A study conducted by Microsoft found that employees who had a one-to-one meeting with their manager within the first week actually tended to be more engaged and more likely to stay with the business.

Unfortunately, many businesses don’t have the resources Microsoft has to invest in expensive onboarding programs. That said, it doesn’t mean that your onboarding can’t be improved. Here are a few things you can do to start making some changes:

• Survey your new hires about their experience within the first week and ask them what you can improve on. Then make those improvements.
• If you can’t deliver weeks of upfront training, make sure you have well-documented processes and training materials that employees can start using from day one.
• Pay attention to change management. One of the most frustrating things for new hires is finding where things sit, or who is responsible for what. Businesses who undergo growth often fall victim to their own success and have critical knowledge live in their employees’ heads rather than in an accessible knowledge base. If you don’t have a knowledge base yet, start creating one and make sure this is continuously updated.
• Give your new employees time to ask questions — this means to meet with them once a week and make yourself available via tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Be approachable and reachable from the beginning.

Offer ongoing learning opportunities

Learning opportunities are crucial when it comes to retaining employees. This is especially true for millennials who are one of the largest consumers of MOOCs (massive open online courses) and active participants in lifelong learning programs. Ignoring your employees’ need for education means missing out on an opportunity to engage with them in a meaningful and productive way.

Training Magazine estimates that the average training budget per employee in 2019 was $1,286. Don’t be put off by this number if you think you don’t have that type of money to invest.

Providing learning for your employees can be less costly if you focus on developing a collaborative environment.

Here are a few things you might want to implement:

Learn one, teach one

Your employees are your biggest asset. They all come from different backgrounds and have different experiences. Why don’t you use this to your advantage and encourage employees to train each other?

Ask employees what they’d like to learn and then see if any employee can cover the topic. Then schedule an ongoing, weekly “learn one, teach one” meeting that anyone can join and learn as much as possible on that given topic.

This is not only a great tool for training your staff, but also for encouraging networking and collaboration across departments.

Shadowing

Offering your employees an opportunity to shadow other, more experienced colleagues is a great way to provide training at a very low cost. Again, make sure you encourage your employees to share their interests and aspirations and then provide them with an opportunity to learn this on the job.

If you have a new person in the sales team who wants to improve their negotiation skills, have them join senior account executives at the final stages of a sales cycle to see how they close the deal. Have a database of recordings that employees can watch.

Shadowing a colleague is one of the most effective ways to not only learn but retain and apply that knowledge at the next given opportunity.

Create a library

Books are a pretty inexpensive way to invest in learning. Have a dedicated corner in your office (or a digital repository) which will be regularly updated with books that will be of interest to your workforce. Books on leadership, productivity, and time-management always do well in this sense but make sure you also cover some niche areas which will be of interest to your staff.

If you are a software company have the latest on coding, but if you’re a marketing agency have books on psychology, writing, SEO, etc. If you want to take this step further, encourage all your employees to take one hour a week to read on the job.

Give them time to learn

In line with reading on the job, allow your employees to take time off for training purposes. If you can’t invest in an official training program, show your employee that you support their development efforts by allowing them to leave the workplace for training without having to take time off. This sometimes can mean more than actually paying for training, and it should cost you much less than investing in expensive accreditations or certifications.

Offer them flexibility

Flexibility in working hours and location used to be cited as perks potential new employers listed on their websites. With Covid-19, this has now become the norm for thousands of businesses, yet some still feel like they’d go back to business-as-usual as soon as things ease up. Still, consider keeping remote work and flexible working hours even post-pandemic as they can really impact retention.

Millennials, along with other generations, have seen what it’s like working remotely and for many going back to the office is a no-go. Along with their better education and a more diverse skillset, today they expect to have the freedom to work remotely and set their own hours. Not to mention that many businesses intend to keep remote work even post-pandemic, so you can quickly put people off if you hurry them back to the office.

Flexible work might bring images of lazy employees lounging on their sofa and not getting anything done. However, nothing can be further from the truth. In fact, Inc.com shared a study that showed that people who are working from home are more productive than their colleagues who opt for an office environment. That’s because they have fewer distractions and can more easily enter into “flow” or “deep work” mode which makes the biggest difference in output.

Flexible working isn’t benefiting just the employee. During the pandemic, we’ve seen that businesses can save millions on office space, utility bills, and office supplies, not to mention the indirect savings made by improving employee retention.

If you’re not getting the benefits and productivity increases with your current remote workforce, then take a look at your tech stack and see if you have the right tools in place for employees to communicate and collaborate both with clients and internally. Tools like Zoom, Slack, Trello, and Wrike can be really useful to establish a virtual office and meeting space where your employees can still keep in touch and remain productive.

Give them a voice

Millennials, unlike the baby boomers before them who had to deal with the aftermath of World War II, have been raised in a period of relative peace and prosperity. They’ve been taught that they have a voice and that they should use it.

In fact, one of the main drivers to seeking out new employment or freelancing career is the promise of a better opportunity. The ability to “call the shots” or be in charge of what/where/who they work with.

This doesn’t mean that your new recruit should join you at board meetings, but you can easily get them engaged and committed to your vision if you include them in bigger, strategic projects from the get-go.

A few ways you can do this include:

• Use part of the one-to-one to discuss a specific strategic challenge you’re facing and ask them for their thoughts. Give them action items to follow up on and get back to you with some answers.
• Entrust them with a bigger responsibility than their role commands. For example, give them a larger prospect to chase than they normally would or a bigger project to manage, one that would require collaboration with multiple stakeholders and the management of multiple moving pieces.
• Pair them up with a more senior employee to work on a problem outside of their initial scope.

Look beyond retention

This shouldn’t be just to please your employees. Many ingenious solutions and discoveries have been made when a person has faced an unfamiliar challenge or when two people with vastly different experiences were assigned to work on the same project.

All these steps can be done with very little financial investment on your part. What they do require is an investment of time and energy in creating a work environment that encourages learning, collaboration, and innovative thinking at all levels of the hierarchy.

Once done, the benefits can go beyond the realm of employee retention and into the realm of employee-driven innovation. The entrepreneurial, curiosity-driven thinking of millennials can stir up new thinking and challenge old processes that could give your business the edge it needs in the new, shaky economy.