How Do You Retain Great Employees?

This week unemployment is at 4.3%.

Businesses are ramping up hiring plans.

The recruiting begins – the headhunting is on!

And then managers realized that they aren’t ready for a rosy economy with the strong job market that goes with it.

Why?

It works like this – unemployment goes down and that’s great for the economy.  But it also means that your best employees have more opportunities and they’re being recruited by companies that need them.

Management Support

You know that when one key person leaves your company, it can be crippling.

How can you stop this from happening?

Employees have to perceive that senior management support them. You need to be engaged and listening, be present. When they know that you support them, that may determine whether or not they take those recruiters’ calls.

They respect what you inspect

Evidence exists that links management engagement with employee productivity – employees respect what you inspect, so they do it.  Pay attention to what they are doing and that it jives with what the overall business goals are. Plan course corrections and communicate those if you are going off track.

There is danger of potentially crippling turnover ahead if management does not get out in front of these issues now.

Employee engagement

What about employee engagement? A study in 2008 defined it as “the level of connection employees feel with their employers as measured by their willingness to help their company succeed”. Employees will go above and beyond for a boss they feel a personal connection with.

And it makes sense that if employees get the message that they are not valued, productivity and commitment can wane.

Unhappy employees are likely to produce much less. They will instead spend time searching Indeed, playing games on Facebook, and on Amazon. So not only should management be concerned about productivity decline, but also be concerned about disengaged employees who have mentally “checked out” and costing you revenue. In fact, the Gallup Organization estimates that “actively disengaged” workers cost US businesses up to $300 Billion per year.

So how do you retain great employees?

Before you dismiss this saying, “My employees are fully engaged and productive, I’m a great boss!” you need to understand that unhappy employees are hard to spot. After all, who wants to lose their job because they complain? So they show up, but not really there, thus produce very little.

When unemployment declines and workers start to have choices again, that can mean trouble for managers who may not have been supportive and present during slow times. You may have already seen it starting to happen. If you haven’t, now is the time to get involved with your employees’ success.

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