Keeping employees as employees
When an employee leaves, he or she takes valuable process knowledge, customer and supplier relationships, and a whole lot of organizational know-how with them. You’re left with a big gap — until you complete the task of recruiting a replacement, interviewing them, hiring them, training them, mentoring them, and simultaneously doing your own day job. The cost of replacing employees is now estimated to be approximately 150% of their annual cost, and it’s no wonder.
Marketers tell us that it is far easier to keep a customer than to find a new one. The very same thing applies to our employees, yet statistics show that more people than ever before are choosing to leave their jobs. A 20-year U.S. government survey involving 10,000 people showed that those between the ages of 18 and 36 changed their jobs about 10 times — or about once every two years. The cost of this to the employer is huge, and has a direct impact on the company’s competitiveness.
There are many reasons for employee complaints (bad pay, bad boss, unappealing job, no work-life balance, etc.), but how many of these complaints will escalate into an employee deciding to leave? And more importantly, what can a particular manager do to pre-empt a departure? The Job Quality Checklist is an often-cited list of when an employee should consider leaving. We can use the same checklist — but from an employer’s perspective — to suggest how to keep them on the team. Ironically, this same checklist can also be used to attract new employees.
As managers, we have a choice — keep our employees employed, or spend our time and effort finding new ones.
Randall Craig is a Toronto-based management consultant and author of Leaving the Mother Ship, a practical guide about career planning and work-life balance. More information about employee retention is available at www.PersonalBalanceSheet.com.
Job quality checklist
1. Are your employees still having fun? Many employees don’t expect ‘fun’, but coming into a caustic atmosphere is bound to have an impact. There is much that you can do to make the workplace inviting; almost all of it involves being a good manager. Even the smallest of things — a c ompliment for a job well done, a smile in the morning — can make a difference.
2. Are your employees being challenged intellectually? Eventually, even the most dull amongst us will rebel against boredom. In addition to training programs, are job rotations, secondments, or new responsibilities at all possible? Doing something new, or something old in a new place, can rekindle interest.
3. Do your employees respect their colleagues? We all learn from our colleagues, good and bad. If the team is not growing together, then they are growing apart, and eventually this will impact retention. Keep the team dynamic healthy by supporting it, and becoming part of it yourself.
4. Are your employees reaching their career goals? It’s surprising how many managers don’t know what their direct reports’ career goals are, let alone whether they are reaching them. If you make an effort to find out, you can help them plot a path within the organization. If you don’t, then employees make the assumption that the only road to their goals lies outside.
5. Are your employees achieving life balance? Especially for Generation X employees, this is the primary reason why they will leave a job. Unfortunately, most work-life balance programs are long on employee feel good, and are not corporately focused. Look for programs that require employees to take personal responsibility for work-life balance, and provide them the tools to do so. (Ironically, improved balance often leads to improved motivation and productivity.)
6. Are your employees’ compensation levels close to their worth? Assess how much it would cost to replace each person on your team, and then compare these figures to each person’s current salary. Especially for key people, doesn’t it make sense for you to address any gap, before a competitor does? The last thing you want is for those key employees to leave because an offer was too good to ignore.
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