Any employer knows that retaining employees is essential to achieving success as a company. As a business owner, you have to invest in each and every employee you hire. If an employee doesn't stick around long, it's going to impact your company negatively. You need experienced and content staff members to keep your company running. 

Companies lose employees for a variety of reasons, but one common reason is because they're not excelling at employee engagement. Employers need to understand the relationship between employee engagement and retention.

Impact that engagement 

Numerous studies and reports have clearly shown that employees working for an organization where engagement is made a priority are more likely to stay. Employee engagement can therefore reduce turnover for an organization and drastically bring down hiring costs. 

Typically, companies where employees aren't engaged are going to have high turnover rates. While being unable to retain employees is costly in and of itself, it's important to realize that there will be other negative consequences for a company if employee engagement is poor and employees are frequently quitting. 

Poor employee engagement also creates problems when it comes to a company's efforts to build relationships with customers and maximize sales figures. Customers inevitably notice when a company goes through employees quickly, and it doesn't look good. Also, employees who haven't been on the job a long time are not going to be as informed and confident as employees who have been working for a company for a long time and have become experts regarding their job responsibilities. 

Improve retention through engagement

Once employers have recognized that they have an employee retention issue that is linked to a lack of engagement, they have several options to decide between in terms of how they can correct the problem. 

Three of the biggest areas to concentrate on to improve engagement are recognizing employees for their contributions, creating a workplace culture that includes constant employee engagement, and providing development opportunities for employees.

You should always research the reasons why employees leave your company by asking exit interview questions. You can also work on the three above mentioned employee engagement improvement strategies. 

Employee recognition-

Employees feel like you are engaging with them if they are recognized for the work that they do. If employees feel ignored, they may lose motivation over time. They may also struggle to feel that they are appreciated in any way by the rest of the company. You can recognize employees by instituting a rewards program. Create a merit based system where employees gain advantages by performing well. Also, arrange for special events for your employees like banquets and awards dinners. Take note of it when your employees go above and beyond.

Workplace culture-

Your company culture needs to motivate employees. The best way to create a company culture in which employees feel motivated is by giving your employees some say in what's going on. You should have staff meetings where every single one of your employees has the opportunity to speak up and will be listened to. You don't want to be micromanaging and insisting on making all of the decisions yourself. Give employees a say in how the company is run and how the environment that they're working in is set out. They will appreciate this and it will come back to benefit you as a company through greater employee retention in the long run.

Development opportunities-

A very common reason why employees leave a company is because they feel they're not growing and developing in their career. You can fix this problem by investing in your employees. Give your employees development opportunities to further their education and get training for new skills.