Those great employees you just brought in get restless, start looking for new opportunities, and leave. Yet all those imperatives take a back seat to your top three priorities: hire, hire, hire. You’re under constant pressure to help professionalize the company, deploy new benefits, establish a compensation framework, and create incentive plans, employee engagement programs, and diversity initiatives. Budgets are limited, but demands are huge. The challenges are especially acute for human resources leaders. For many, it can feel like a race against time along a track whose ground is always shifting. And, depending on the size of your organization, coaching and consulting firms can provide the expertise necessary to retain your staff.Life inside a startup-especially a high-growth startup-is inherently chaotic. Considering the events of last year, you may want to invest in outside resources that can provide support and mentorship opportunities. How comfortable do employees feel sharing their true disappointments and frustrations with their managers? Interviews and conversations conducted by third parties, however, may provide your workers with a safe space in which to share serious underlying issues within the team.Ī lot of turnover prevention boils down to finding out what your people need. In order to better understand the risk for high turnover within your company (or understand the high turnover rates that may already exist), you may want to think about the power dynamics at play during these conversations. Reassess how you conduct retention surveys and exit interviews.At this point, budgeting for increases should be one of your highest priorities, incorporating feedback from stakeholders to find out the ways in which you can truly care and advocate for your team. Identify the shortcomings and come up with actionable steps to improve your offerings. In preparation for the “turnover tsunami,” it’s probably time to sit down with your team and re-evaluate whether your benefits packages are equitable, competitive, and honest. Progressive business leaders also stay on top of market trends, comparing their own company’s compensation packages to competitive salaries available elsewhere.Ways to increase engagement include offering exclusive training opportunities, stretch assignments, and having transparent conversations about compensation and benefits. Top performers, especially, should feel excited to stay within a company and see growth. However, a more innovative approach would be to identify and cultivate new skills for that role upskilling can increase the value of that position and also keep top performers in your team engaged.In fact, one of the many reasons people consider leaving is a lack of engagement.

When managers find themselves having to re-fill positions, they tend to default to recruiting the same skill sets that were previously successful in that role.Here are other considerations to take into account as you prepare to face high turnover rates: Such data is the essential jumping point in formulating plans and implementing strategies that will make your workplace irresistible to current employees and prospective, talented job-seekers. In other words, why have your employees stayed with you thus far? Why might they consider leaving? If you do happen to lose talent, you should be conducting exit interviews if you aren’t already. Survey your current employees to identify what’s working and what’s not. Retention surveys are usually the first step to initiating such a conversation. But really take a moment to evaluate what transparency could mean for your team: having a sincere conversation about company culture and company needs demonstrates that you not only value the performers responsible for your company’s success, but that you’re ready to fight to retain them. Transparency is one of those words that are so overused without real implementation that it tends to lose its meaning. As a leader in your organization or field, you’ve likely heard the word “transparency” more times than you can count.

High attrition