Active listening helped this company increase its retention rate by 22%.

Are you listening to your employees? An active listening strategy could be exactly what your retention strategy needs.

Just ask Kerry Norman, the EVP of operations at CHG Healthcare, a Utah-based healthcare staffing company with 4,038 employees. CHG’s retention rate has increased from 66% in 2005 to 88% today as a result, she said, of the company’s active listening strategy.

To put that number into perspective, the average retention rate at staffing agencies is 75%, according to Timerack, a staffing agency software provider.

“We really take to heart what we hear from our people,” she said. “We have this strong track record of listening, and then acting off of [employee] feedback and I think because we focus on that so much, retention is a byproduct of high engagement.”

High attrition rates can be a heavy financial burden for employers: It can cost about one-third of a worker’s annual salary to replace them, SHRM research shows.

Over the last decade, Norman said the organization has used active listening to ensure its offering employees the benefits they say they truly need—something that’s led to greater satisfaction and higher retention.

Listen up. One thing CHG learned was that its employees felt its paid time-off policy was lacking—particularly when it came to parental leave. So, in 2021 it made a change.

“We really leaned into our investments there and offered fully paid parental leave of 12 weeks,” Norman said. “That’s in addition to the disability benefits we traditionally offer to women having a baby.”

The company also discovered that employees wanted more fertility benefits, so partnered in 2019 with care management company ProgenyHealth to offer options like surrogacy or adoption.. Since then, over 50 babies have been born to employees who’ve used the benefit.

CHG isn’t always able to give its employees exactly what they want—their request for an onsite daycare, for example, couldn’t be fulfilled, Norman said, because the company couldn’t justify the investment for the number of staff members who would use it—but it offered an FSA with employer match that employees can use to pay for childcare, among other services, as well as a 15% discount on tuition at Learning Care Group daycare centers.

“People appreciate the ability to win in their personal lives and in their work lives,” Norman said. “[They’ll] make choices on what kind of employer they want to [work for] based on whether they have that flexibility to make it all work together effectively.”