What Can You do to Retain Your Best People?
Peter Cappelli
Let’s talk about employee retention. This is a relatively new topic in the history of management. If you look through books, as I did, you wouldn’t see much of anything about it until the 1990s, and the reason is because in the past most employees stayed with the same employer for a very long time. If you look at the average 50- year-old in the U.S. right now, they’ve worked for almost 13 different employers. So we think job-hopping and retention is a problem of young people. It’s not. It goes all the way up to the top of the organization.
The first thing we want to do is be clear that we probably don’t want to retain everybody. It’s not that we want people to quit, but if you went back and said to your organization, “I can guarantee everybody who’s here will be here till they retire,” it probably wouldn’t win you a lot of friends in the organization. So what we’re talking about is how to retain the people who are most important for us to retain.
The first thing to remember about this is, when people leave, they almost never just decide to quit, go home, and pout. They’re virtually always hired away. That is, somebody comes and gets them. And the main reason that they leave is career advancement, and that is, they can see the path to a better job someplace else, or they can see an environment that maybe suits them better.
So, one of the things you want to do with employee retention is exit interviews. That means when people are leaving, you want somebody who can talk to them who is not you, who can ask them, “Why did you leave?”
And actually this works best if it’s a third party, because then they believe it’s unlikely to get back around to you.
You know, we tend to believe that people quit because of money. Certainly, that’s true sometimes. But it’s also true people aren’t telling the truth; they don’t want to tell the boss, “The reason I’m leaving is I hate you because you’re a terrible boss.” So instead they say, “Well, somebody just offered me more money.”
The big issue in retaining people, surprising to lots of folks, is actually social relationships. So the best
predictor of keeping somebody, the thing that’s most important, is if I feel that there are people here who care about me and I care about them. And the most important of those relations is with my immediate supervisor.
If I believe my boss is looking out for me, and my boss is fair, I’m much more likely to stay.
So, the first thing we want to do in terms of thinking about improving our retention is to think about how we are managing our direct reports. Do I have a relationship with them that’s the kind that makes them feel that they want to stay? Am I the kind of boss who is somebody who they believe cares about them?
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