Retaining Your Best Employees
Ask any manager and they will tell you that employee retention is critical to the long term health and success of any business. They readily agree that retaining your best employees ensures greater productivity, customer satisfaction, greater sales, etc.
Organisational competencies, lost knowledge and recruitment makes failing to retain a key employee costly. Various estimates suggest that losing a middle manager for example costs an organisation up to ten times his salary to replace. The lost of a senior executive is even more costly. At the same time, there are the intangible costs of replacing good employees such as:
- Long service employees have learned more and are more productive
- Significant replacement costs
- Operational disruption
- Loss of knowledge and key skills
- Lower morale and reduced productivity of those staff who remain
- Lower productivity of replacement in the initial stages
Hence keeping and retaining best employees should be the norm in organisations. If you are losing critical staff members then it means that something is not quite right with your organisation and remedial measures. Some methods to retain employees are:
Identify
An easy way to do this would be to take a piece of paper and then note down names of perhaps 20 employees (of all levels) whose services are indispensable to the organisation. After that, be proactive and do everything within you power to keep them. Never wait until you receive his / her resignation letter then take action.
Listen
Conduct surveys so that the pulse of the organisation can be monitored at all times. Get feedback on what is right and what is wrong from an employee’s perspective. Don’t assume you know.
Appreciate
Research has shown that people crave and yearn for recognition. People like to feel that someone appreciates the work they do. A genuine pat on the back, given at the right time, for right reasons, and in front of the right people, can boost staff morale and commitment in ways that money never will. Again, never show appreciation only when people have put in their resignations.
Hence it would be critical that organisations take a cold hard look at themselves and ask the question, “Are we doing enough to retain our best employees” If they are able to answer yes sincerely, then it will augur well for the future of the organisation. If the answer is a no, then the organisation better start seriously looking at some of the points above and importantly take action.
After all, an organisation is only as good as its best employees.
