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* boom
times and slow times alike, you need to keep your best
people. Let’s look at five proven practices to help you do
just this.
1. Provide
room to grow. Nothing is more frustrating for an employee
than discovering he is out of growth opportunities. At
Telephia (now Nielsen Mobile), a San Francisco-based firm
that provides syndicated information to the telecom and
mobile media markets, avoiding this has become an
employee-retention priority.
Management
sits down three times a year to review its employees’
opportunities for growth. Executives pinpoint successors
for key roles and identify those interested in promotion
and those who might fill interim spots.
“This
review process has allowed the management team to keep
finding opportunities to advance its star performers.
Without these reviews, we might miss candidates for
internal promotions and cross-functional rotations,” says
Sidney S. Gorham, then president of Telephia and now of
Nielsen Mobile.
To further
encourage employee development, Leigh Branham, author of
The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave (Amacom, 2005),
advises organizations to provide easily accessible
information on career paths and competency requirements
that spell out how employees can progress.
2.
Continually enrich the experience. Keep your direct
reports engaged by working with them to expand their skill
sets and empowering them to do more. For example, studies
show that front-line workers such as sales or customer
service representatives derive greater job satisfaction
when managers give them the authority and resources to
solve customer problems on the spot.
“People
want to own things and to have the authority and
empowerment to do the job right,” says Todd Davis, vice
president of people services for the organizational
solutions business unit at FranklinCovey in Salt Lake
City. “I coach other managers to trust and know their
employees, allow them to make mistakes and allow them to
grow.
3. Express
appreciation. While pay may not be the first reason people
leave, it can be a significant factor. “Dissatisfaction
about pay has as much to do with how pay is communicated
and pay inequity as it does with pay amount,” says
Branham.
For that
reason, many companies now link base pay more to value
creation and less to rank or years of service. In doing
so, it is essential to communicate clearly to all
employees how “value” is determined.
Other best
practices include rewarding results with variable pay that
is tied to business goals and making cash payouts for
on-the-spot recognition.
4.
Counteract stress. Employee stress is a symptom of all the
other things that can go wrong within a workplace. People
are often expected to accomplish more with fewer resources
in less time. Abuse, harassment, insensitivity,
inflexibility of work hours and repeatedly being forced to
choose work over family life are all contributors.
One way
organizations can address these issues is to initiate a
culture of “giving before getting” by providing generous
work-life and health benefits, and a wide range of
employee services so that your employees know you are
concerned with their welfare.
Doing so
acknowledges a simple sociological phenomenon: When you
give to your work force, most workers will give back.
5. Cement
connections to senior executives. At the most basic level,
employees want to know that their organizations will be
successful, assuring them of a job and a future, asserts
Branham. In that regard, employees have three questions
about their leaders: Will they steer the ship to success?
Can I trust them to do what they say? Do they have trust
and confidence in me?
To address
these issues, Branham says, leaders must inspire employee
confidence with a clear vision, a workable plan and a
belief in employees’ competence to achieve it. And backing
up words with actions is essential.
When Bill
Catucci took the helm of AT&T Canada in 1996, he was the
third CEO in five years. The company was financially
unstable, losing $1 million a day, and employee morale was
in the gutter.
On his
very first day on the job, he was invited to speak at the
annual sales meeting in Toronto. That weekend there was a
huge snowstorm, and Catucci couldn’t get a flight in. So
he got in his car and drove to the meeting. It took two
days, but Catucci sent a powerful message just by showing
up: He was serious about change and believed in connecting
directly with the people who would carry it out.
“That kind
of thing enabled me to get the people in the company to
rally behind the vision and the strategy and all the
things we needed to do to make things better,” he says. n |
