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After a company puts in the hard work onboarding its new employees, it would be a shame to see them walk right back out the door in less than a year. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what can happen if managers and team leaders don’t make an effort to keep employees happy beyond the onboarding lifecycle. The following three retention strategies can help companies boost employee engagement and keep team members satisfied throughout their (ideally, lengthy) tenures.

Don’t assume that everyone wants the same thing.

“One size fits all” isn’t accurate in the world of fashion, and it doesn’t work in the business world, either. Employees are individuals, and they each have their own interests, preferences, and goals. Workers who are busy parents may value flexible schedules over higher salaries, for example. Middle managers might want the traditional “promotion and a raise” kind of rewards. And younger employees could be looking for mentorship, training, and a supportive culture.

In one survey, when asked “What motivates you to excel and go the extra mile at our organization?” the 200,000 respondents offered a wide variety of responses. The top five motivations cited were “peer motivation,” “intrinsic desire to do a good job,” “feeling encouraged and recognized,” “having a real impact,” and “growing professionally.”¹ Money, often perceived as the primary motivation for most people, ended up only in seventh place on that list.

Rather than assuming that money (or anything else) is what motivates everyone, managers should talk to their team members regularly about what would engage each of them most in their role. This conversation doesn’t have to follow a formal process but could take place in a chat during a team breakfast in the office or during a one-on-one after-lunch walk around the block.

Leverage strengths rather than focus on weaknesses.

Too many performance reviews focus on what employees are doing wrong rather than what they could be doing right. Leveraging strengths over weaknesses is a far more effective approach. In fact, strengths-based employee development can boost employee engagement by as much as 15 percent:

Almost seven in 10 employees (67 percent) who strongly agree that their manager focuses on their strengths or positive characteristics are engaged. When employees strongly disagree with this statement, the percentage of workers who are engaged in their work plummets to 2 percent.²

In addition to its positive effect on engagement, this approach can also drive increases in sales, profits, and customer engagement.³

Open doors, not floors.

Transparency can lead to higher levels of organizational trust, which is one great reason to encourage an open-door policy and frequent communication between company leaders and the rest of the population.

But keep in mind that although open-door policies can help increase employee retention, open-floor policies can be huge collaboration killers. Despite the widely held belief that open-plan offices boost interaction and collaboration, they actually drive down face-to-face interactions by 70 percent.⁴

All of these strategies have proven their effectiveness over time and in multiple contexts. Clearly, they work. Now it’s up to managers and leaders to follow the data and implement these practices in their own organizations.