Do You Have a Chief Retention Officer?

Want to dramatically reduce voluntary employee turnover?

Turn every manager into a chief retention officer.

Sustained, extremely low unemployment has made employees more demanding, disloyal and discontent than they’ve been in decades. This shift in their mindset makes it incredibly challenging – yet critical – for managers to retain their most talented people.

During a talent war, how can you keep your best performers?

According to RainMakerThinking’s Bruce Tulgan, a certain amount of turnover is actually beneficial – as long as the employees who leave are low performers. In his latest whitepaper, “Winning the Talent War: Building a Winning Culture of Attraction, High-Performance & Retention,” available for download here, Tulgan recommends a proactive, strategic approach to retention – so you control who stays and who leaves:

• Turn every manager into a chief retention officer. Most employees want a boss who works with them to help meet their wants and needs. Make sure your managers have regular, candid discussions with employees to: strengthen relationships; help employees achieve their goals; and address small problems before they become large ones that drive great people out the door.
• Turn the reasons people leave into reasons they work harder. Should you give employees false hope or make false promises to convince them to stay? No. If an employee expresses a need or want that’s totally unrealistic, your managers should let them know – and then develop practical solutions that work for everyone:
  • When an employee requests special accommodation (e.g., leaving early one afternoon to visit a sick relative), train managers to be as helpful as possible. Even if granting the request causes short-term complications, that employee will remember and value your manager’s effort to accommodate them – which may help you retain the employee longer.
  • If an employee asks to work a special schedule, perhaps with the flexibility to work from home, or to work odd hours, does it make sense to turn them down flat? If that person is very good at their job, and difficult to replace, consider what the long-term benefits of letting them work that schedule could be. The long-term cost of not granting that request could be losing that great employee to your competition.
• Begin your retention efforts on day one. Train managers to start talking with your valued employees about retention on their first day, and to keep talking about it. By discussing how to meet their needs and wants on an ongoing basis, employees are much more likely to be open with your managers when they are trying to decide whether to leave or stay. If managers are flexible and generous, they may find a way to make employees want to stay and work harder, at least for a little while longer.

Win the talent war by making retention everyone’s responsibility.

Turning managers into chief retention offices is just one weapon to help you win the war for talent; in his whitepaper, Tulgan shares many more you can begin implementing today.

Partner with PrideStaff to reduce turnover.

A national employment agency like PrideStaff provides flexible staffing services that reduce voluntary turnover and improve retention of high performers by:

• creating higher quality matches between the individual and the role;
• preventing job burnout;
• facilitating greater job flexibility and work/life satisfaction;
• freeing your core team to work on important, challenging projects.

How can we help? Contact your local PrideStaff office today to learn more.