Unemployment proved to be the lowest in nearly 50 years in September of 2018 at 3.7% nationally. That rate has held steady through the first quarter of 2019. Despite the drop, People Report warns that low unemployment has not reduced staffing pressure on customer service business leaders. With an increase in available jobs of nearly 2% year over year in retail, restaurant, and convenience store industries, managers have begun looking for ways to increase customer satisfaction and employee productivity to maintain sales growth amid high employee turnover rates.

Let’s face the truth. Employees will leave. Family, the economy, and self-fulfillment are all important realities to your employees. One or all may eventually cause them to leave your business and follow other endeavors. You need to create a structure for your business to handle this turnover.

Like most macro issues in business, there isn’t one big fix for these problems, but the suggestions you’ll find in this post will add up to large employee cost savings.

Properly Train Employees

Creating a strong onboarding system is essential for new employees as well as managers. Workers become frustrated when they don’t have the tools to complete the job, and everyone naturally wants to do their job well. Employees that understand the expectations of their role tend to remain at a job longer. If your company has never identified exactly what each new employee should know, now’s the time to do it. Here’s what makes an effective onboarding program.

• Plan out the training step by step and start with foundational information, then move on to job specifics.
• Make the entire training plan and schedule available for employees so they can see exactly where they are going and the importance of each task.
• Ensure all managers use the training checklist in the correct order.
• Include check-in meetings in the training schedule to make sure new employees are on track and feel supported.

Mobile checklists systems like Action Card allow you to plan out and track entire employee shifts. Morning to night, you can hold your team accountable to ensure they’re completing every task and making sure it’s done right.

Once your employee has been trained well in their individual role you can begin to cross-train in different departments or services. This way you don’t have to rely on many individuals locked into one role, eventually falling into a turnover trap to keep to those roles filled. Instead you’ve created a team of employees that can act as a safety net when one person leaves. Each member of the team should be able to handle many jobs, back each other up at busy times, and get rewarded for doing so.

Invest in Your team

Investment isn’t solely a monetary action, it’s taking the time to build a motivated team that works in favor of your business instead of against it. An easy way to motivate employees is to reward them for a job well done. Rewards can be small like a gift card, a paid lunch or the reward can be engaging. The first to sell a new product gets to leave an hour early; the best sales record for the week gets a parking spot. It may sound silly when you’re considering your bottom line, but happy employees mean low turn-over. When employees are excited to get the job done, they’ll do the job better and quicker, which means improved productivity.

Hold Performance Reviews

Once you’ve made valuable contributions to your employee’s motivation, make sure to check back in with them regularly. Things change, a happy employee can get stuck in a rut after a long, hard week. Their performance and efficiency may suffer. Hold performance reviews to give them a chance to tell you what’s wrong and offer their own ideas on how to motivate them again. This will also provide you the right environment to let them know what is expected from them, discuss their strengths, and give effective feedback on what improvements must be made.

The key to increasing employee productivity is to take the guesswork out of getting the job done for managers and employees alike. Action Card adds a level of efficiency & accountability that you and your employees will embrace with easy to use checklists & audits. When follow through is built into each process, you can free up your energy to work on the next improvement and avoid high, costly turnover.

To learn more about how the Action Card app can help you to increase employee productivity fill out our short contact form and schedule a demo of the system.