Eight Tips For Keeping Your Best & Brightest
While the economy does seem to be improving, news of the "jobless recovery" continues to disappoint. Good people, it would seem, must be available easily, and everywhere. Retention should be the least of our problems. Even if employees are disgruntled, where are they going to go?
But if you’ve tried looking for talented people lately, you may have noticed that it’s not as easy as you’d think. As the New York Times recently reported, "... even at [around] 6 percent, the jobless rate remains lower than it was during the aftermath of the most recent recessions." And according to a Watson Wyatt analysis, the amount of "surplus labor" available today is at its lowest level in ten recessions.
To make matters worse, studies of all kinds point to increasingly unhappy employees in the workforce. All indications are that when jobs do reappear, there will likely be churn.
So, while it may at first appear unusual to discuss retention issues in the current economic climate, we think now is precisely the time when companies should be evaluating their retention strategies. Good people are very hard to find, and it’s not going to get easier. Competitors will increasingly find that their best place to find good people is in your hallways. Companies that take a hard look at their retention strategies and practices now will find themselves in a better competitive position later when the economy begins its anticipated recovery.
What to do? Get the right people on board and ensure their contentedness while you can. Drive towards employee satisfaction in the coming year, so that when head hunters and recruiters are relentlessly pounding the phones, attempting to hire away your best talent, you have set a deep, "sticky" foundation from which few will want to leave.
Eight Tips To Retaining Your Best and Brightest
1. Start with Recruiting
Retention strategies begin with recruiting. It’s best if your recruiting plan links neatly with your overall business plan, reflecting an awareness of your long term needs. This exercise will likely force a true assessment of your organization’s level of resource, and shed light on smaller, yet equally important issues such as the existence of well-defined position descriptions that accurately describe roles, responsibilities and requirements.
It’s imperative that managers making hiring decisions understand the attributes and qualities you are looking for in new employees. Hiring people who are able to do a job is important from a functional perspective, but hiring individuals who possess the kinds of qualities that reflect your company’s values is critical to keeping them. People want to associate with others who hold similar values. Integrity, honesty, and fair dealings are all of a fabric that adds richness and value to the workplace. Moreover, this fabric provides reinforcement when employees are asked, or when they ask themselves, how they like working for your company and why they work there.
2. Establish Realistic Expectations
Communicating realistic expectations with candidates about the positions for which they are interviewing is vital. Describing in a straightforward manner what you expect of a person in a particular job and how they will be measured is part of the critical equation to achieving long term satisfaction. Another part of the equation is making sure that the candidate is straightforward in accurately describing and reflecting their skills, experiences and strengths. Laying out the expectations of the job, and its pros and cons, gives candidates the opportunity to consider their ability to do the job and fit into the organization. And, as in any true partnership, all involved need to be direct and honest so managers can make the right hiring decision.
However, even if those two parts of the equation have been achieved, what does the company do to make sure that expectations are met? A manager and an employee must remain in close touch about how goals will be reached. What training and development is available? How does the goal setting process work? How is it monitored? Are expectations of performance met both from the manager’s and employee’s perspective? Once hired, the candidate, now an employee, shouldn’t be "out of mind."
3. Understand Why People Work for You, and Why They Don’t
On the front end of the employment relationship, develop ways to capture and monitor why people come and remain part of your workforce. Ask new hires to complete questionnaires that capture information about why they decided to join your firm. Uncover the pivotal items that made them accept your offer. It isn’t usually "just" money. Many times, the reputation of the company will be critical. Good people don’t join companies with bad reputations. Also, the quality of employees is critical when candidates make an employment decision. People want to associate with others from whom they can learn, who can challenge them, and who can help them grow. Ask candidates who don’t accept your offer to complete a questionnaire. Find out why they didn’t come to work for you and who else is competing for them.
On the back end of the employment relationship, make sure you do multiple levels of exit interviewing. Have the exiting employee’s new hire questionnaire available. Review it with them. Learn what happened to discourage their original reasons for joining your company. Three to six months later, follow up with them and find out how their new job is progressing. What are their reflections now on their experiences with your company? What advice can they offer about improving conditions? Often, you’ll find "gold" from these follow up interviews, highlighting issues that are having an adverse effect on your employees. Understanding the full employment spectrum -- why people are coming to work for you, turning down your offers, staying with you and leaving you — will likely shed some light on your "retention" mysteries.
4. Make Retention a Formal Metric
Make retention a formal metric of your company’s balanced scorecard. Your diligently-compiled financial measures give you only a partial snapshot of your company’s health. What about the health on the people side? Establish a target for acceptable turnover and manage to it. Have a macro target but understand and manage the micro target of voluntary turnover. All companies have involuntary, or forced turnover — those are decisions that managers have to make for the good of the company. However, many times voluntary turnover is preventable.
Appreciate the cost of turnover — in many cases it’s up to 150% of the cost of a position. There are also non-financial costs that ripple throughout an organization when good people leave. Questions are raised. Others begin to fixate on what they are missing. Moreover, the social and institutional knowledge that walks out the door with good people is difficult to replace. Their knowledge on institutional process can not be readily replaced and, when it can, it’s only with plenty of time, training, and development. Preventable voluntary turnover creates direct and indirect costs that, in their entirety, can not always be easily quantified, but are palpably felt.
5. Analyze the Treatment and Trust in Your Organization
Assess honestly the treatment of your employees and the trust quotient they have in the company. Understand clearly who you have in your workforce. Think about the programs you have in place for your employees. Find out what your team really thinks about them. Are the programs addressing their needs? Does your workforce meet your needs to be competitive? Survey and evaluate. Be honest with yourself. What do you deserve from the workforce, given the support you are providing? Will that achieve the company’s goals? If you have the skills and qualities in your employees and can compete effectively for them, then don’t be afraid of gaps in satisfaction. Address them. Deal with them. Try to solve them. Do what you can and understand what you can’t do. Don’t be surprised and don’t avoid the negative. Be aware of it.
6. If You Don’t Like What You See, Get Help
If you don’t like what you see in some areas, then get help. There are issues that might not be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction but they can be addressed and discussed. For example, for years major consulting firms have had to deal with work-life balance issues: Heavy out of town travel, long periods away from home, client demands late Friday for something needed first thing Monday morning — eliminating any personal weekend plans. Sometimes you can’t avoid these issues. It’s the nature of the business. Face the reality, but address the challenges. Programs can be developed that recognize the sacrifice and alleviate some part of the strain. Over time and through lots of effort, this can be done while preserving the basic business imperative — client service. Acting upon the concerns of your employees — showing a good faith effort -- builds trust and loyalty. People won’t trust you if you don’t make a good faith attempt to act.
7. Build Retention Savvy as a Competency of Your Managers
Build a retention mindset into your managers’ competency. Managers need to be sensitive to their employees’ needs. They need to be practical and fair, and understand the "golden rule." If you’re a relationship-intensive business, or if people are central to what your business delivers, then retaining motivated employees is likely a key to your success. Make sure managers and supervisors are treating your people the way you would want to be treated — or more specifically, the way they want to be treated. Benchmark your competition. How do they perform in retention? How proficient are they in solving workplace problems? But, be practical and understand that some issues might not have an easy answer for your environment. Understand what will fit into your culture.
8. Customer and Employee Acquisition and Retention Are Parallel Strategies
Employee recruiting and retention strategies are akin to customer acquisition and retention strategies. Identifying the "right" customers or clients is no different than identifying well-suited candidates and employees. Just as you must understand your superior value proposition for your set of customers, you’ll want to ensure you are the superior choice to some groups of candidates and employees. Of course, in both cases, you have to deliver on your promise.
Our Conclusion
The importance of employee retention is not news. It’s a consistently written about and discussed topic. What may be new, however, is the urgency that the turning economy is placing on the issue. Retention is now, more than ever, an integral piece of corporate survival. Those that choose to ignore it do so at their own peril.
