High Turnover in Your Warehouse Operations?

June 6th 2017 20:49:12 PM

Follow These 5 tips to Stop Employee Turnover

A big part of your warehouse operations costs may be labor. Increasing productivity through warehouse automation can help cut those costs, but another area that increases labor costs is employee turnover. The cost of employee turnover is staggering. Not only do you need to recruit and hire new workers, but you will also lose time to employee searches and interviews, lost productivity, and lost knowledge as workers exit without transferring information to newcomers. High turnover also hurts employee morale.

So what can you do to stop high turnover? With some adjustments, you can turn around high turnover rates over time and improve employee retention for better productivity.

1. Set and manage expectations: Make sure that your job descriptions are up to date and that hiring managers and anyone interviewing candidates know they should be open, honest, and transparent about the job, company, and working conditions. Expectations are set through honesty and facts given to candidates during the interview process.
2. Allow work-life boundaries and balance: Don’t intrude on your employee’s personal time. Make sure that they take vacations, weekends off, and holidays. Offer flex time for employees caring for dependents so that they never have to apologize for driving Mom to the doctor or caring for a little one home sick from school. Taking the stress off of people’s lives makes them happier about their workplace.
3. Offer plenty of feedback: Train your managers and staff to give and receive feedback. Make sure that criticism is always tempered with praise. Regular reviews, employee training, and other methods of employee motivation are important and a part of giving and receiving quality feedback to improve job satisfaction and performance.
4. Train your managers: Managers need training in management skills. They need to learn how to delegate fairly, provide clear directions, and manage workloads without favoritism. Rude employees must be dealt with immediately to prevent workplace issues from escalating.
5. Give regular reviews and raises: Rather than freeze wages, try to at least give some increase so that people don’t have a financial incentive to go elsewhere. Schedule regular performance and salary review periods and make sure that salaries are both commensurate with experience and fair for the jobs and levels of employees.

Streamline Your Warehouse Operations

Having the right tools for your employees is another way to keep your employees happy and motivated. If you’d like help setting up your warehouse operations to be employee friendly, contact Scanco. Our warehouse management team has helped to increase our clients’ productivity and efficiency for nearly 30 years, and we’re happy to help you sort through your warehouse options and requirements for your growing business.