Here’s a list of strategies for effective retention:
1. Make a good start.
This begins with hiring people who are suitable for their jobs and making sure that they understand what they are getting into. A good start also begins with a new-employee orientation that makes people feel welcomed and part of the company.
2. Create a great environment—with bosses whom people respect.
Managers often assume that company policies and corporate culture determine the working environment. They do, up to an extent. But policies can be circumvented. In any case, the atmosphere in a department or unit is more important to individual employees than the culture of the corporation as a whole.
Bad bosses are not conducive to a great environment. How many of your unit’s managers or supervisors are repellent to their reports? How many have temper tantrums, berate their subordinates in public, blame others for their own failures, or never have the sense to say “Thanks, you’re doing a good job”? If your managers or supervisors are repellent, count on every employee with marketable skills to leave.
In the end, it’s better to replace bad managers and supervisors than to replace an endless stream of good employees.
3. Share information freely.
Freely dispensing information—about the business, about financial performance, about strategies and plans—tells employees that you trust them, that they are important partners, and that you respect their ability to understand and contribute to the business as a whole.
4. Give people as much autonomy as they can handle.
Many people enjoy working with a minimum of supervision. So give your employees as much autonomy as they can handle. Doing so will make them happy and make your job as manager easier.
5. Challenge people to stretch and give extra.
Most people—particularly the ones you want most to retain—enjoy a challenge and the feeling that you’ve entrusted them with bigger responsibilities than they had a right to expect. So put the people you want most to retain into jobs that will make them stretch—and give them the support they need to succeed.
6. Be flexible.
Flexible work arrangements are highly successful in retaining employees. To be sure, not every manager has the authority to create whole new work arrangements. But nearly everybody can allow some on-the-spot flexibility, letting employees rearrange work to care for a sick child, for example, or to keep a doctor’s appointment. Today’s employees value that kind of flexibility.
7. Design jobs to encourage retention.
Nothing is more soul-deadening for an intelligent employee than a job that is too repetitive, too isolated, insufficiently challenging, or downright unpleasant. So if you see unacceptably high turnover in a critical job category, take a good look at what you’re asking people in that job to do every day. You may be able to cure the turnover problem through job redesign: adding variety to a repetitive job, engaging isolated employees in occasional team projects, upping the challenge, etc. If a job involves one or more repugnant tasks, consider eliminating or outsourcing those tasks.
8. Identify potential defectors early.
Great work environments and great jobs are a matter of opinion; what challenges one person may terrify another.You won’t know how well you’re doing on either score unless you ask.
9. Be a retention-oriented manager.
Never forget that part of your responsibility as a manager is to ensure proper staffing in your unit. Retaining good and excellent performers is part of that job. So look at how you manage people and how you schedule workflow. Are you the kind of boss who manages in ways that encourage the best people to stay, or are you unknowingly driving them away?
