Did you know 42% of employees who left their company in the last year say their departure could have been prevented by upper management or the larger organization? High employee turnover can cost your dealership a lot of time and money, so let’s uncover four ways you can increase retention rates for your business:

Why do employees leave?

Before you can determine an action plan to improve retention, you must evaluate what may be causing employee exits in the first place. While the reason for leaving depends entirely on the individual’s circumstances, some factors seem more common in an employee’s likelihood to resign.

For example, work environment quality greatly impacts an employee’s decision to stay. In fact, iHire found that 35.7% of employees quit because of a negative or toxic workplace. Following close behind, other contributing factors include:

• An unfavorable relationship with manager/supervisor (28.9%)
• Feeling underappreciated (21.8%)
• Desiring a better work/life balance (21.1%)
• Lack of growth opportunities (20.5%)
• Inadequate pay (20.3%)

How can you improve retention rates?

Assess Employee Satisfaction

The only way to really know how your employees feel is to hear their feedback directly. Provide opportunities throughout the year for your team to voice their opinions. Whether it’s sending online, anonymous surveys or having candid meetings with your employees, implementing various methods for employees to feel heard may also uncover new ways to increase success across your dealership. For example, a GTE survey revealed that a more autonomous leadership style produced greater results from employees than a heavily controlling leadership style. Surveys can reveal insightful findings such as a specific leadership style producing greater results in employee performance.

Proactively identifying your staff’s pain points is only the first step to increasing employee satisfaction. From here, you must implement changes across your organization to address their grievances.

Encourage Professional Development

Investing in your employees’ development not only makes them feel valued but also improves your dealership’s performance. Allow your workers to attend training events and tradeshows to advance their knowledge of your systems and industry. This is a great way to learn about industry trends, changes, rules and regulations, and new ideas to further your business. But the benefits don’t stop there. Attending various events and networking will boost awareness for your dealership and help cultivate stronger relationships with other industry partners and potential customers.

Invest in the Right Digital Tools

Over the years, we’ve seen how technology can simplify and accelerate various activities, and the same can be true for your dealership’s operations. You can adopt a dealer management system that streamlines every function, freeing up time and energy for employees to be more productive. The right digital tools will eliminate tedious, manual tasks so your team can focus on larger initiatives, and when your team is equipped to get the job done effectively and efficiently, your bottom line will reflect it.

By simplifying tasks for your employees, you’ll help them feel more confident and comfortable in their ability to get the job done successfully. Empowering your employees with helpful tools will mitigate the risk of burnout, which can be detrimental to their commitment to your business. In fact, those who experience frequent burnout at their current job are 2.6 times more likely to be actively seeking a new one.

Cultivate a Positive Work Environment

As we mentioned before, a significant amount of employee turnover is due to a negative work environment. It’s crucial to employee satisfaction, retention, and business success to make your team feel comfortable and valued. For example, 83.6% say recognition impacts their motivation to be successful at work.

In addition to increasing acknowledgment of employee efforts, you can strengthen morale and relationships across the organization by participating in team-building activities and group events. By creating a workplace where people enjoy coming in every day and leave feeling supported and appreciated by their superiors and teammates, you can reinforce their commitment to your organization.

Conclusion

Committed employees are essential for closing deals and increasing profitability at any dealership. By evaluating your current workplace environment and your employees’ satisfaction you can identify ways to improve their experience and mitigate employee turnover.