Unchecked early turnover squeezes warehouse operations and forces operators to slog through wasted money, training time, and labor. Warehouse turnover averages around 50% annually. Most employees who exit depart within the first 90 days, but we can walk you through 5 key strategies to overcome that hurdle and strengthen your team’s productivity. By adapting your hiring processes you can find and retain the most relevant candidates to build and retain a better team.
The Biggest Factor: Consistent Teambuilding
Consistent teambuilding is your most important safeguard against high early turnover. When employees are respected throughout the hiring and onboarding process, their concerns are heard, their desires are fulfilled, and they feel like their work and contributions truly matter in the workplace, they are much more likely to stay. Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly dominating the workforce and prioritize:
- good pay
- a safe and team-oriented work environment
- positive workplace culture
- chances to boost their professional skills through workshops or upskilling opportunities
When you pick the right candidates and provide what candidates today want, you’ll build a better team, boosting your retention and productivity.you can boost your retention and success by building a better team.
5 Steps to Strategize Warehouse Hiring and Retention
There are 5 steps to building a better team. Combat the cycle of churn with a cycle of teambuilding: source strong talent, prepare them well, and give them room to grow within your workplace. These steps work together to make your workplace a more efficient, productive environment with a more positive, attractive culture.
Step 1: Enhance job descriptions and recruitment strategies to boost your transparency.
Up to 41% of employees quit early because the job did not meet their expectations, making misalignment of candidate expectations your biggest hurdle. You must tackle this challenge before any of the following steps can fully succeed. It’s critical to transparently showcase exactly what your positions require and what your team needs. Be thorough and specific in your job descriptions or consider making a realistic job preview to highlight the benefits and challenges of the role.
Step 2: Leverage technology for talent acquisition and retention through efficient hiring.
Utilize pre-employment assessments like skill assessments during the hiring process, mobile-friendly hiring applications, and ATS workflows. These tools efficiently identify the applicants that you should invest the most time in and help streamline and organize your HR’s work. By shifting your hiring process to be more mobile-friendly, you are modernizing your approach and opening the door to more applicants, especially more Millennial and Gen Z candidates. Automating your hiring process lets it move more quickly, allowing you to review a greater number of candidates, giving you a higher likelihood of netting many strong contenders.
Step 3: Implement comprehensive onboarding and training programs.
Quality candidates require quality onboarding to maximize retention. Thoroughly explain all job tasks and provide skill demonstrations and on-the-job training to prepare employees effectively. Retention of your rockstar workers is essential because their knowledge and experience helps them more expertly train new employees, keeping the team cohesive and productive. When you hire the best candidates and provide robust training, you not only support retention but also prevent your top performers from becoming overwhelmed or burnt out–a cycle that can lead to further turnover.
Step 4: Promote positive engagement and workplace culture through good management.
Employees who feel secure and relevant are more loyal to their workplaces. Bad managers are a major pain point for employees, while skilled managers who listen to and act on employee concerns are a determining factor in employee retention. As the brokers of workplace culture, managers set the tone for communication, respect, and conflict resolution. a workplace culture that prioritizes safety, ergonomics, employee voices, and effective leadership attracts more applicants. Happy employees will spread the word of their job satisfaction, helping you network for more employees during those busy holiday seasons.
Step 5: Develop advancement opportunities to promote from within.
Giving employees the option to participate in workshops and professional development opportunities, gives you a pipeline for talent promotion. Upskilling employees and preparing them from within for higher positions lets you retain your best talent and build a stronger team at every rank, making it easier to acquire managers that preserve and enhance positive workplace culture. Millennial and Gen Z employees want their hard work to translate into promotions. Offering professional development opportunities helps attract candidates who might otherwise overlook warehousing roles, viewing them as a career dead end.. Show candidates that working with you can lead to valuable career skills, such as automation expertise, logistics management, teamwork, and dispute resolution.
Conclusion
Rapid early turnover is a big challenge in warehousing, but the solutions are sensible and strategic. Right now, Millennial and Gen Z employees are becoming the main candidate pool. Attracting them through transparent, modernized hiring practices and strong pathways for onboarding and professional development will help you retain more talent and slash your early turnover rate.
HighMatch gets you started right by providing you with data-driven assessments and roadmaps to excellent job previews, all backed by our Industrial-Organizational psychologists and 15 years worth of testimonials and expertise. Our collaborative assessments let your unique needs determine the questions and focus, empowering you to effectively leverage modernized, automated hiring.
With HighMatch, you onboard a suite of tools that make your hiring process more transparent and efficient. The quicker you identify valuable talent and offer them a job, the more you reduce the likelihood of them accepting an offer elsewhere. We give you the confidence that our tools will help you find good fit talent that will provide a long-lasting basis for building a better warehouse team. If you’re curious to know more about what our tools offer warehouse operators, check out our blog post on how our assessments boost warehouse retention.
