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McGraw-Hill - Briefcase Books - Retaining Top Employees, SAMOKSZTAŁCENIE, Mcgraw-Hill [Briefcase Books]

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“Employee What?!”
Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. ...
Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent stupidity in
which we indulge ourselves.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong
is to think you control it.
—John Steinbeck
In this introductory chapter, we will:
• Look at exactly what “employee retention” is.
• Explore where the concept first came from.
• See how it has developed over recent years.
• Examine three trends that are currently shaping employee
retention strategies.
Just What Is “Employee Retention” Anyway?
There is no secret code or formula that precisely defines
“employee retention.” Ask 10 managers what they mean by the
1
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Retaining Top Employees
term and you’ll receive 10 (sometimes very) different answers.
Answers like these:
• “Employee retention? You mean stopping people from
leaving this organization?”
• “Employee retention is all about keeping good people.”
• “Getting our compensation and benefits into line with the
marketplace.”
• “Stock options, crèche facilities, and other perks.”
• “It’s got to do with our culture and how we treat people.”
• “Staunching the high employee turnover we have in
department x or job function y.”
• “Presenting a consistent, effective employer proposition
across the entire employee life cycle, thus ensuring we
source, hire, manage, and develop employees who part-
ner with us in achieving our organizational goals.”
As you can see, managers’ perceptions of the meaning of
employee retention can vary from the mechanical (“Reduce this
employee turnover figure to an acceptable level”) to the
abstract (“It’s about our culture and values”). Definitions can be
couched in curt, wholly objective phrases or in flowery, vague
“corporate speak.” Some managers view employee retention as
a distinct, controllable element of labor management (“It’s a
matter of compensation and benefits”) and others consider it a
cross-functional, pervasive, and seemingly all-encompassing
set of values or methodologies (“It’s about our culture and how
we treat people”).
Which of all these “flavors and colors” of employee retention
is right?
Is employee retention any single one of the definitions cited
above? Is it a specific combination of two or more of those defi-
nitions? Is it something else entirely that we haven’t mentioned?
Well, the answer to all those questions is ... “Yes.”
Employee retention is each of the definitions cited above. It can
also be a specific combination of two or more of those definitions.
And it is some other things that we haven’t even mentioned yet.
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“Employee What?!”
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How can this be? How
can one seemingly
straightforward concept be
so many disparate, some-
times contradictory things?
The answer is because
employee retention—effec-
tive employee retention—is
not some externally generated set of activities or metrics that
have a life of their own and that are applicable to every circum-
stance. As we will see throughout this book, effective employee
retention is something that is very specific to each individual
organization.
Two organizations in the same industry, making the same
product, in the same town, with the same labor pool and the
same customers and the same suppliers can see employee reten-
tion very differently, because of differing management styles and
different past experiences. Even within the same organization,
employee retention can mean something entirely different from
one division to another or from one manager to another. And
within any one division, under any one manager, what’s key to
keeping one employee may not be relevant to another.
Employee retention
A
term that means many
things to many people, with
its meaning and means of achieving
usually specific to each individual
organization—and even to each man-
ager and each employee.
Biotech vs. Burger Bar
What employee retention means to the biotech company
down the road, peopled with chemists and concerned with
R&D issues, is very different from what it means to the burger chain
franchise in the next street, employing students and facing speed-of-
production issues. And the way each company addresses it is neces-
sarily different as well.
The biotech company may think of employee retention primarily in
relation to a handful of key chemists whom they want to retain for a
period of years, while a product moves through its R&D cycle, through
testing and certification, and finally into marketing and sales. In con-
trast, the burger joint is likely to be concerned about retention prob-
lems across a much broader category of employees and with a time
horizon of months rather than years.
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Retaining Top Employees
“No Generalization Is Worth a Damn ...”
“No generalization is worth a damn, including this one!”
Those words of caution—attributed to Mark Twain,
George Bernard Shaw, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—seem particularly
appropriate here. All the generalizations about employee retention, no
matter how wise, are worth little if you don’t apply them judiciously.
Every organization—and every department or division in every
organization—is a different environment for employee retention.
Additionally, within each organization, department, and division, cir-
cumstances will change from year to year, month to month, maybe
even from day to day, in such a way as to render your carefully con-
structed employee retention goals, strategies, and tactics either obso-
lete or at least in need of a good overhaul. If you know your environ-
ment and keep alert to changes, you can make the most of any gener-
alizations about employee retention.
So you will not find in this book (or elsewhere) one prescrip-
tive, generic answer to the question of employee retention, no
single plan that fits every situation. Instead, you will discover
how to define employee retention for yourself, for your organiza-
tion, and even for specific departments or divisions in your
organization. You will learn how to establish realistic, organiza-
tion-specific employee retention goals, how to select the right
strategies and tactics to attain those goals, and how to gauge
the success of those strategies and tactics. Finally, and most
importantly, you’ll learn how to monitor and vary your employ-
ee retention goals, strategies, and tactics over time, as your
organization’s circumstances change.
What “Employee Retention” Used to Mean
Let’s start by getting our definitions and vocabulary right. This
entails understanding just a little history.
The term “employee retention” first began to appear with
regularity on the business scene in the 1970s and early ’80s.
Until then, during the early and mid-1900s, the essence of the
relationship between employer and employee had been (by and
large) a statement of the status quo:
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“Employee What?!”
5
You come work for me, do a good job, and, so long as
economic conditions allow, I will continue to employ you.
It was not unusual for people who entered the job market as
late as the 1950s and ’60s to remain with one employer for a
very long time—sometimes for the duration of their working life.
If they changed jobs, it was usually a major career and life deci-
sion, and someone who made many and frequent job changes
was seen as somewhat out of the ordinary.
As a natural result of this “status quo” employer-employee
relationship, an employee leaving his or her job voluntarily was
seen as an aberration, something that shouldn’t really have
happened. After all, the essence of “status quo” is just that little
or nothing should change in the relationship—and leaving was a
pretty big change!
So, in the 1970s and later, as job mobility and voluntary job
changes began to increase dramatically, the “status quo” model
began to fray substantially at the edges. Employers found them-
selves with a new phenomenon to consider: employee turnover.
The Rise of Employee Retention as a Management Tool
As organizations began to feel the impact of the rise of volun-
tary employee turnover, so a matching management tool began
to be developed—employee retention.
In this earliest, simplest form, employee retention was the
Employee turnover
Percentage of the workforce who left
the organization in any particular period. If, for example, an
organization employed an average of 100 people during one
particular year and 45 of them left (for any reason) during that year,
the theoretical employee turnover rate for that year would be 45%.
In practice, managers are mostly concerned in gauging the rate of
voluntary departures
—employees who choose to leave of their own
free will. People may leave the organization for many other reasons—
retirement, ill health, firing, or enforced redundancy.These “involuntary
separations” are usually excluded from the calculation of the employee
turnover rate, thus allowing the organization to concentrate on the
controllable reasons for employees leaving.
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