Investing $$ in employee happiness and retention is a tricky signaling problem.
If you need the best people, you probably should care about retention.
What if, on the other hand, your managers suck so much that good and bad workers perform at the same level? In this case signaling to your people you don't give a crap about them puts you in a powerful negotiating position.
They also want their retained staff to be happy, however. It's not so great to have an employee who's just barely satisfied enough to stay on with you. The quality of his/her work won't be as good, typically.
If you want them to stay and would consider it a loss if they left, why wouldn't you give them incentive to stay? Why wouldn't you try and keep the employee?
If a manager indirectly finds out that an employee is looking over the fence and takes that negatively, then I think it's a bigger reflection on the manager than the employee. Either you consider them valuable or you don't.
Really good observation. I think retention has become a side effect of happiness, culture and efficiency. We've had low turnover so it really didn't cross my mind because I'm not actively trying to convince people to stay. My takeaway here though is to not take people for granted. Although we have regular 1-1s, sometimes people don't talk about the little things that chip away at them and become big unless they're explicitly asked.
Every company - especially every company over a certain size, knows there are a certain percentage of people that just 'phone it in' and aren't pulling their weight relative to others - pretending that isn't true, really doesn't help anyone.
More importantly, it is demoralizing to the people you want to keep - to make it seem to them that putting in the extra effort doesn't do anything for you, so they start looking for the exits to find a position where there effort and talents are better appreciated; retaining the best people, at the end of the day is more important than a low-performer's hurt feelings.
"The key to being able to keep the good employees is not so much the salary you offer them or even the actual work, it is more about how you manage them and how they feel working under you as their manager. "
Personally I don't think there is a key, instead it's a case of all of the above. You can't keep an underpaid employee happy. You can't keep a bored employee happy. You can't keep an employee happy when you don't treat them well. I've left companies for all 3 of these reasons, it only takes one reason.
Because retention can be too subjective. If you lose a lot of bad people then retention is not a bad thing. If you start to lose good people then what was the common reason? Not willing to pay? Company culture? Team culture?
Company I work for retention can be factored in but the ability to rate your boss is given each year and if that comes back negative along with poor retention than that is reason for further action.
I've also been a manager at a company with a shitty culture, and you simply can't stop your good employees from leaving for greener pastures. You're kind of happy for them when they do. I care about my employees and value them as human beings, but I also couldn't address their grievances or promise them any resolution to larger cultural issues. I knew they would leave, so I stopped being upset when they did and started taking the turnover as part of the job.
It's not that managers don't care about their employees, they just don't care if or why you left because those circumstances are outside their control. HR collects that info in exit interviews, and a line manager has no influence with HR. If turnover starts hurting the company's bottom line, they'll do something about it. Otherwise it's not going to be a priority at the levels it needs to (how effective is your "Diversity Officer" in creating real diversity?)
It is impossible to keep everyone happy at a company at all times. The difference between a company which seems to have happy employees and the one that doesn't seems to be the amount of PR spending. It is an advertising problem. Some companies managed to build that image by selective targeting. Otherwise how do you explain the churn rate of employees in the valley?
More than losing the people who have the best prospects, you lose the ones that feels the least connected to the company. Even if you have many other prospects, if you still feel strongly for the company you work, you'll probably stay. The ones that leaves if you ask them to, wouldn't have stayed for very long anyway.
The big mistake everybody makes is thinking the issue is about hiring and retaining individual employees.
You don't want to "hire good employees" but you want to "create a great team". If an employee feels like he's part of a team where he can create more value than he could someplace else, it makes sense for him to stay. If he feel s like the team is holding him back, he ought to leave in a heartbeat.
It's said that "employees don't leave a company, they leave managers", and this is definitely true. One bad manager can cause employee retention problems that go on for years.
The employees are not in control and their input isn't wanted. If the argument centers around making them "feel" a certain way, then that's called delusion.
Throughout the article there's no mention of anything tangible done for retention.
Combine that with the lack of interest in exploring a retention model and I (and seemingly most other contributors here) have little sympathy for someone crying "I can't keep anyone".
Quality people are easy to find, they're out there in droves. Finding a quality company is the difficult part.
I don't get your point. High turnover means unnecessary costs. And especially in senior positions it might take years to get the necessary experience to get equally productive. So unless you really aim at the very bottom, you should care about employee retention.
I have never been in management, so maybe I am missing something here. Even from a purely economic perspective, wouldn't it make sense to keep your existing employees happy than having to deal with constant turnover, unhappy workers etc? All I see is constant hiring (even in small teams) and people constantly leaving, to the point that some teams become completely new in just 3-4 years because of attrition.
In my previous job, a lonnnnnnnnnnnnng list of items were pending, because they didn't have enough people to work on them. The mobile app hadn't been updated in 3 years, not even the bugs were fixed. And still the company was one of the most boring places I've worked, with meeting after meeting after meeting...
How hard can it be to have individual conversations with employees once a quarter or something, pay them decent, and at least try to help them do their jobs better? All of which will result in more revenue for the company, no?
I had a chat with a recruiter who argued that remote workers should be paid less. Shouldn't they be paid more (or at least the same as in-office workers for the same work) because the company is saving money on office space, electricity, internet and even stupid coffee and toilet paper? If the recruiter opens the conversation that remote workers are worth less, then how do they expect the candidates to take them seriously? This is just one example.
I just don't get it. Maybe I am not management material/
I mean, in general, management as a group has no idea how to retain employees.
Part of this is because (as you allude to) a very significant chunk of them don't even believe that's important to do: employees are just interchangeable cogs in their system, grinding along to produce bonuses for them.
But part of it is because retention is about motivation, which is a very, very complicated topic, and any attempt to create a one-size-fits-all solution to it will inevitably fail.
Of course, a large percentage of those who do believe that retention is important are deeply convinced they know exactly what one-size-fits-all solution is The One True Way, and anyone who doesn't respond to it is just some degenerate weirdo.
So they go on missing, and we go on shaking our heads.
If you need the best people, you probably should care about retention.
What if, on the other hand, your managers suck so much that good and bad workers perform at the same level? In this case signaling to your people you don't give a crap about them puts you in a powerful negotiating position.
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