Canadian Marketing Blog

Employee Retention: The Leader’s Unique Role

"Chris how do you consistently maintain such high employee retention?" That’s one of the most frequently asked questions I get whenever I chat with leaders – regardless of the size, industry or geographic location of their business.

Now that highly-skilled, highly mobile and highly-sought professionals are a company’s lifeblood, I find that leaders are showing more interest in equipping themselves with the tools and knowledge to keep their most precious assets – i.e. their professionals. This newly found enthusiasm for employee retention is natural given that, according to the CMA’s President & CEO, John Gustavson in June’s 2008 e-Communicator, there is currently a talent crunch.

Below, find some of the key lessons about retaining enthusiastic and engaged employees that I’ve gathered over the years of building a thriving leading-edge company from scratch. One theme is common throughout: the smartest investment a leader can make is in ensuring that their team of employees succeeds. Make this your mantra and your employee retention will always be something of which you can be proud.

Lesson 1: Take a hands-on approach to employee orientation

Sustaining a corporate culture that encourages on-going innovation is the best path to achieve business goals. Leaders can play a critical role in shaping their culture during orientation – recognized as one of the most important times for setting a strong foundation with new employees. For example, leaders can:

Establish a bond with new employees. Within the first 10 days of new employee joining your company, spend time with them to understand their background, skills and future career aspirations.

Share the company’s vision. Within the first 20 days of a new employee joining your company, repeatedly expose them to the vision – and make sure they understand how their work contributes to achieving that vision. This can involve a one-on-one discussion, team discussion or company-wide presentation.

Acknowledge unique contributions. Beyond having the ability to function on a day-to-day basis, an employee only becomes truly oriented to a company when they feel as if their unique contribution is acknowledged. Within the first 30 days of a new employee joining your firm, recognize their contribution. This also becomes far more meaningful when done in a team or company-wide setting.

Lesson 2: Apply marketing skills to employee retention

Successful leaders know how to engage important audiences. And your team of employees is your business’ most critical audience. Bring your skills as a marketer to actively engage employees:

Anticipate future needs. Pro-actively develop plans that capture the imagination of what is important to your employees. This could involve modifying benefits plans, updating training programs or bringing other perks that align with your employees’ desires to grow personally and professionally.

Maintain an on-going dialogue. Since every successful dialogue begins with listening, establish a schedule of social and business events throughout the year where you can engage with your team of employees. These are terrific opportunities to learn about what projects and processes are exciting and/or frustrating your team. A natural extension to this on-going dialogue is establishing training and/or mentoring programs – identified as a possible retention method in the CMA’s recent study, Cultivating Market Talent: Overcoming the Obstacles.

Watch for reduced involvement. Just as you monitor clients for signs of disengagement, watch for employee behaviours that suggest that they are losing interest in their projects or their teams. Often, employees are looking for new challenges and opportunities to innovate within your company. Make sure your company can truly harness that energy and enthusiasm.

Lesson 3: Quantify employee retention in terms of contributions

All too often the rationale for tackling employee retention is framed in terms of cost-reductions. With that focus it is easy to overlook the unique contributions to your company’s effectiveness and productivity that result from retaining committed and engaged employees. Some of these measurable benefits include:

• New opportunities for business associated with developing new products/services
• The ability to take on additional work because of a “strong bench” of professionals
• Client retention and loyalty
• Time and cost-savings when existing employees train new employees

By quantifying and tracking these retention benefits, leaders are in a much better position to prioritize the resources required to retain employees.

Finally, by integrating all of these lessons into your regular schedule, you can have a positive and dramatic impact on your employee retention while building the foundation for future leaders. That, in turn, will provide you with an increased ability to meet the challenges that face your company now and in the future.

I welcome hearing any suggestions that you have for ways to help leaders retain employees - share here on the CMA Blog, or feel free to contact me directly at president@thindata.com

While I was managing people (I did so for over 30 years) the key was to create an environment where employees loved to come to work since only then will they never want to leave. This a lot easier to do than you might think and besides, the effect on productivity and company performance in general is hugely positive.

The first step is to get rid of the traditional top-down command and control approach to managing people. The reason is that top-down concentrates on producing goals, targets, visions, orders and other directives in order to control the workforce and thereby achieve organizational success. Concentrating on giving direction prevents these managers from doing much of anything else.

Top-down treats employees like robots in the "shut up and listen, I know better than you" mode, and rarely if ever listens to them. Top-down ignores every employee's basic need to be heard and to be respected.

In this way and others, top-down demeans and disrespects employees sending them very negative value standard messages. The standards reflected in this treatment "lead" the employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with the same level of disrespect they received. Top-down prevents employees from using their inherent creativity, innovation and productivity thus denying them from having any pride in their work. This is the road to very poor corporate performance and very poor retention. Top-down managers are literally their own worst enemies.

If you want your employees to produce very high performance and love to come to work, get rid of all traces of a top-down approach. Start treating employees with great respect and not like robots by listening to whatever they want to say when they want to say it and responding in a very respectful manner. Everyone wants to do a good job and no one wants to be told what to do. The best direction is very, very little direction. They do want to be trained and coached so that they can do their work well.

Responding respectfully means resolving their complaints and suggestions and answering their questions to their satisfaction as well as yours, but most importantly theirs. Listening and responding respectfully "leads" them to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with great respect. It also means providing them more than enough opportunity to voice their complaints, suggestions and questions. Listening and responding respectfully also inspires them to unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation and productivity on their work giving them great pride in it and causing them to love to come to work. Retention problems will disappear.

You will be stunned as I was by the huge amount of creativity, innovation and productivity you have unleashed.

Best regards, Ben
Author "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed"

Thanks for this very TIMELY article! One thing I always try to instill and promote in our business is FUN! Thanks!

KK

A reminder that many businesses should review retention issues regularly. Excellent post! Another resource for employee retention is the book by Hal Rosenbluth and Diane McFerrin Peters, " The Customer Comes Second".

Don O'Connor

This is a great article. And so is the very informative comment by Ben.
Employee retention is a concern for me as I'm sure it is for most leaders. I have been following many of the suggestions made above and agree that keeping your employees motivated and wanting to stick around really is more simple than people perceive it to be.
Another great group of article's I've read recently on leadership that touch on talent and people management is by a consulting firm in Toronto called Torque. If you are interested, they are a very good read.
http://www.torquecustomerstrategy.com/publications-details.php?id=47