Over half of all American employees have unused paid time off in 2018, according to the U.S. Travel Association. The same survey found that over 768 million vacation days went unused in that year.

Some workers are reluctant to use their PTO. This is owing to the potential that human resources is ignorant of the formal and informal business activity of each department. Vacations can exacerbate the feeling of overwork that peers and supervisors may have. Some workers may feel pressure from society to provide an explanation for their absence, such as a medical problem, even when they need a break.

Businesses lose money when PTO is not used because employee fatigue lowers productivity and increases churn. If PTO is promoted, employees’ performance at work will improve and their mental health will be safeguarded.

How taking time off helps the business

Benefits for employees are sometimes taken for granted, but how does paid time off help the company? Why would a company pay its employees to do nothing?

Retention

Employees who enjoy vacations and family time have a better work-life balance. You might not be able to afford hikes and other amenities that frequent vacation skippers will request. When bonuses are not granted or when they cannot make up for lost time in an employee’s life, family-oriented professionals will look for a less demanding workplace to achieve their desired work/life balance.

Productivity

Everyone has observed productivity decline as a result of burnout or inadequate sleep. Workers need breaks from time to time to refuel and keep their motivation. One study found that performance evaluations improved by 8% for each additional 10 hours of vacation time an employee took. When employees are always working, it is more difficult for them to think creatively and solve difficulties. After taking some time off from the office, a worker or a leader could feel rejuvenated and have a new, potentially creative viewpoint on their work.

Business culture

Many workers worry that if they use up all of their paid vacation days, they may face consequences. Some coworkers dislike the extra effort of covering for someone else while they’re gone, especially during high season. Some people worry that their vacation may be used against them during the employee review process. In the end, wasted PTO fosters unjustified hostility and strife in the workplace.

Save cash

If your business compensates employees for unused PTO, you are exceeding their annual salary. There can still be long-term costs related to things like employee churn and declining health even if your state has “use it or lose it” laws for PTO. The cumulative stress and frustration may negatively affect the company’s general morale.

Keep an eye out for these issues with solutions like HRM software with payroll.

Tips for encouraging employees to take PTO

It is different from simply “giving” employees time off to feel free to use their PTO. Encouragement can help to reduce the amount of unutilized PTO.

Talk about the benefits of taking time off from work

Show the benefits of both short and long breaks to the workers. At work, bring up the topic of work-life balance and stress how important it is to your company’s basic values. Employee engagement surveys can be used to track burnout and levels of motivation.

PTO and time off policies should be made clear in company communications

Your employee handbook needs to explicitly state your PTO policy. Make it straightforward for staff to request time off, and make sure management do everything in their power to accommodate justifiable requests.

Set a rigorous but practical deadline for PTO requests

Your business must provide managers enough time to fill in the holes if it wants to maintain productivity. If the handbook clearly states the deadline, it will be easier to remain consistent.

Stop vacation embarrassment

Ensure that managers and team leaders speak well of PTO. HR may remind a person if they have accrued a certain amount of PTO.

Offer some vacation rollover

A predetermined maximum rollover can encourage those dependable employees to use their surplus. Because they view it as a way to safeguard their income during Family Medical Leave, employees who have dependents may save up their PTO.

Allow staff to unplug completely

Vacationers shouldn’t be thought of as distant, available labor. Make an effort to get the materials and solutions ready in advance. Cross-training staff with learning management software to prepare for a colleague’s leaving is a great strategy to increase the system’s resilience.

HR and management set a high standard

Because ambitious employees may be concerned that taking time off may hurt their chances of getting future promotions, you must make it clear that everyone is encouraged to take time off. By informing their team of impending events and making sure that important tasks are performed, managers and team leaders can serve as positive role models. With a dedicated HR and payroll management solution, leaders can schedule, plan around, and fully enjoy their vacations, while keeping their teams in the know, and on task.

For subscription and SaaS businesses, metrics like the customer retention rate and the closely related churn rate are essential for tracking how much revenue you’re losing and identifying possible trends.

The fact of the matter is that reducing churn and increasing customer retention are essential to long-term business expansion.

In this post, we’ll talk about how to accurately track customer retention and churn and five ways to keep customers coming back to your SaaS business.

What exactly is customer retention?

The number of customers who remain with a business over a predetermined period of time is the subject of a metric known as “customer retention.”

On the other hand, the percentage of customers who cancel their subscription within a predetermined amount of time is known as the churn rate. Both of these metrics have a significant impact on monthly recurring revenue (MRR), which is arguably the most important indicator of future business success.

On a monthly basis, a good rate of customer retention is typically greater than 90 percent, though the higher the number, the better. While it is obvious that you will never be able to keep every customer, a low retention rate indicates a problem for your business.

You can compare your customer retention rate and other metrics to those of other subscription and SaaS businesses.

For the majority of businesses, investing in customer retention is a more sustainable growth strategy because it costs more to acquire new customers than it does to keep existing ones.

Consequently, before implementing strategies to increase customer retention over time, it is essential to conduct an analysis.

Customer Retention Strategies

Now that we’ve talked about how customer retention affects SaaS and subscription businesses, let’s look at some ways to improve this metric.

1. Excellent customer support

Your company’s level of customer service can either make or break a customer’s experience. Provide excellent customer service.

Customers want to know that you will be able to help them, whether it’s because of a problem with the product, a failed payment, or a problem with the network.

Good customer support includes quick responses to questions from customers, assistance with onboarding (more on this later), and prompt troubleshooting.

In addition to providing reactive customer support, investing in proactive outreach can have a significant impact.

Regularly checking in with your customers can increase the opportunities for engagement and value from your product, even if they aren’t planning to leave.

2. Set up a process for onboarding new customers

Since the onboarding process is another important part of the customer experience, it’s important to get it right to avoid losing customers early.

An essential component of a successful onboarding process is demonstrating to customers how to use your product to accomplish their objectives.

An effective customer onboarding process includes a simple signup process, a persuasive welcome email, and assistance during the initial login.

By keeping an eye on the outcomes of your trials, you can also learn about new users’ initial perceptions of your business, product, and onboarding procedure.

You can avoid losing customers before they sign up by using these insights.

3. Produce useful educational materials

If your product doesn’t provide enough value, customers won’t stick around for long. By providing high-quality educational materials and training courses, you can speed up the rate at which customers reap the benefits of your product’s ROI.

Customers can also get answers to a lot of their first questions by using getting started guides and a help center, both of which are excellent resources for resolving any additional issues that may arise.

In the same way that you want to create an excellent onboarding experience, you should also offer resources and establish a community for your product.

Workshops and webinars are resources that increase subscribers’ motivation to stay for a long time and give them even more value out of their subscriptions.

4. Track and Measure Churn

By determining which customers are leaving and the reasons for their departure, you can devise an informed strategy to retain them.

By conducting cohort analysis and tracking and measuring churn for various customer segments, for instance, you can determine the reasons why some customers may churn more frequently than others.

Using this information, you can deal with customer expectations not being met, bad onboarding experiences, unsuccessful acquisition strategies, and other broader business issues.

You will also be able to recognize generally customer conduct deviations that are causing agitation if you dive into the information about abrogations, minimize, bombed installments, and more.

These insights may reveal whether voluntary or involuntary turnover is caused by additional factors. Reduced churn and measuring it will increase customer retention over time.

5. Make it easy for your customers to give you feedback

Getting your customers to give you feedback is a great way to find issues with your product or interactions that make customers cancel.

To take this a step further, collecting cancellation data and acting on it aids in preventing disloyalty and maintaining customer loyalty over time.

When customers decide to cancel their subscription, a quick email or in-app notification is a convenient way to get feedback.

Using cancellation insights, you will be able to identify and address issues with pricing, a lack of certain features, poor customer support, and any other factors that lead to customer churn.

Calculating customer retention and churn

The retention rate is calculated by dividing the number of new customers by the total number of customers at the end of the period.

This indicates how many customers remained loyal to you throughout that time period. After that, the total number of customers at the beginning of the period is divided by this number to determine the retention rate.

Churn rate can be looked at in a few ways, dependent upon whether you really want to follow revenue churn or customer churn.

Divide the number of canceled customers by the number of active customers over a given time period to determine customer churn. Then, multiply by 100 to get a percentage.

The ability for modern schools and colleges to provide students with reliable and proactive security systems has become increasingly important in recent years, with one study finding 60% of students claim the perceived quality of campus security to be a deciding factor when choosing where to study. 

Though the safety and security of students and faculty members will always rank as a top priority for educators and campus security teams, smaller colleges with access to limited funds may struggle to match the advanced security systems and smart technologies commonly utilized in larger facilities. 

However, by learning how best to secure school security grant funding from government and charity sources, and taking the time to plan considered upgrades to existing school infrastructure, security staff and school administrators can develop cost-effective solutions designed with longevity in mind. 

To explore this idea further, this short article will discuss a number of actionable ways to strengthen campus security using smart technologies, automated systems and data-informed integrations. 

Upgrade rather than replace legacy hardware 

The core components of an effective campus security system are unlikely to change dramatically as hardware and software systems become more advanced, so rather than entirely replacing legacy video security cameras, alarms and access control systems, it can be wise to simply update them. 

For example, facilities that currently operate RFID or NFC-based access control systems will likely already have a Wiegand wiring interface installed, with this infrastructure also being compatible with several modern mobile access control and key card systems. This means security teams could simply install new access control readers to update their systems without allocating funds towards infrastructural work. 

Similarly, video security systems can often be improved without the need for replacing physical hardware. Many traditional analogue and IP cameras can be upgraded to function as part of a smart cloud-based system by connecting existing hardware to a cloud adaptor, allowing for integrations with cloud file storage systems, automatic software updates and remote-access viewing functionality. 

Streamline workflows with cloud security management 

Campus security teams can often make more efficient use of limited resources by choosing to invest grant funding into the development of cloud-based security management systems. By connecting all installed video security cameras, access control readers and alarms to a single unified management platform, smaller teams can use automated alerts to better focus their attention on unfolding events. 

Automated incident responses can be developed whereby stimuli detected by one device are used to instruct the operation of the wider security system. For instance, if an access control reader detects the attempted use of falsified credentials, alarms may be triggered with on-site teams notified of the event remotely, allowing staff to view nearby camera feeds to plan an appropriate incident response.  

Developing such a system can dramatically reduce the amount of time that security personnel will be expected to manually view real-time data feeds, allowing staff to instead engage with students in a more meaningful manner with the benefit of automated alerts ensuring no incidents go undetected. 

Promote personal security with app-based alerts 

The benefits of smart technologies and cloud-based security systems can also be extended to students in the form of automated alerts and real-time security updates. By allocating grant funding towards the development of a bespoke site-specific security application, staff can provide students with a better way to manage their own personal safety on campus without upgrading all hardware systems. 

Students can be issued unique credentials to be stored within an app-based account, with this data used to manage access control permissions, scheduling software and other related digital systems. In addition, real-time alerts can be sent directly to users if on-site devices detect a potential security threat.  

Providing students with more control over their own incident responses can allow teams to strengthen campus security without relying on the installation of expensive physical hardware, instead focusing security policies towards actions and protocols with the benefit of smaller data-informed installations. 

Creative ways to spend grant funding 

Finding ways to reduce excess spending on security system upgrades can often leave schools and colleges with a little extra room to fund tangentially related developments, for example, some grant programs can be used to support the creation of STEM education projects and training procedures. 

Often school administrators will simply be required to demonstrate how these projects relate back to wider security improvements, though some programs such as ESSER funds for school security specifically request that a certain percentage of awarded funds must be spent on educational programs. 

Additionally, SRO grants can be used to fund the hiring of dedicated school resource officers, allowing existing security teams to strengthen their overall posture with the extra support of sworn law enforcement officials, high-level training programs and other related physical security improvements. 

Summary 

Ensuring that students and faculty members are appropriately protected from security threats continues to be a top priority for school administrators and physical security teams, however, improving and upgrading legacy systems can prove difficult for smaller colleges with limited funding. 

Thankfully, with the support of grant programs, carefully considered planning and the development of data-informed smart technology systems, schools and colleges of any size can make efforts to find cost-effective methods of strengthening campus security with longevity, efficacy and efficiency in mind.