In my last HRZone blog entry I set out the five main reasons why employees leave their companies. Today I’m going to describe some corresponding employee retention strategies.

1. Create and maintain a working environment that attracts, retains and nourishes good people.

The issues you need to attend to include developing a corporate mission, culture and value system, insisting on a safe working environment, and creating clear, logical and consistent operating policies and procedures. Your aim is to make your company a place where people want to come to work. Among other things, this means:

Above all, today’s employees want a culture of openness and shared information. They want to know how the company is doing, where it is going, and how they can help. How does your company fare in terms of openness? To find out, ask yourself the following questions:

2. Develop effective employee relationship strategies.

In all but the smallest companies, people work for their supervisor, not you – so the first thing is to give your managers and supervisors plenty of relationship training.

Secondly, ask employees why they work for you. This will not only reinforce these benefits in employees’ minds, but will also give you a better understanding of what attracts people to your company. You can then use that information to recruit new employees, and you can also ask: “What can we do to make things even better around here?”

There are many employee relationship strategies that can impact retention. Here are just a few:

Ultimately, employee relationship strategies help to build a sense of family. In families, people learn to work out conflicts and disagreements; stick together through good times and bad, and support each other’s growth. It’s much harder to leave a family than to leave a place where you just go to work.

There are three more employee retention strategies that deserve close attention:

Look out for more details about these strategies in my next blog post.