Retain Your Best Employees

Transcript:
Today I want to be talking with you about retaining your best employees. You may have noticed if you’re out recruiting for any new roles in your company that it is an employees marketplace. I want to speak with you about retaining your good ones.

Just this morning I was with a client, she was saying well, you know, I don’t know if she’s worth this kind of a salary, she’s made some mistakes.

I know that this employees has only been with her for about a month. So the expectation that the employee is not going to be making mistakes is fairly unrealistic. Just because they come from the industry with some level of experience, doesn’t necessarily mean they know how things get done in your business.

I often say it takes about nine months for your new hire to even know what planet they landed on, much less be a real asset to you. By developing a good employee into a great employee has them be worth their weight in gold.

And that’s on you.

So the employee experience is something that you can control and it’s a lot more critical than you may have thought it was in the past. We come out of the recession with like they’re lucky to get a job.

That’s not the case today.

Today you’re lucky if you can find and keep good help.

In my “Humanity, Transcending The Digital Age” keynote, I talk about the stages in evolution that we’ve gone through. And, let’s just talk about the last two and the current one that we’re entering. The industrial age what we were dealing with was people doing tasks that were mainly done with their hands, so we needed a body.

In the Information Age, it was knowledge workers that drove the economy. So your engineers and your scientists and knowledge people really were the ones who were creating value.

In the new age that were entering, sometimes called the conceptual age or the cognitive age, my favorite – the imagination age, is where we’re bringing the level of a person’s creative ability and their capacity to think and combining it with the new technologies that are out there.

Where the world is gone from this scarcity kind of mentality, to the abundance of: through prosperity, people are no longer struggling the way that they did for home or food and so on.

And, so now they’re searching a lot more for what meaning they can have out of their work.

So the purpose of your business, having a purpose in the business that’s bigger than just simply putting something out the door, they care about that.

They care about the happiness in the workplace.

They care about being able to grow and develop themselves through mastery, through autonomy.

In a recent research paper that I was reading from IBM and Globoforce, it was talking about employee experience, that what matters to them is their sense of achievement, their sense of purpose in the work that they’re doing, whether or not they feel that they belong in the business, they’re day in and day out happiness, and is the environment one of enthusiasm and vigor.

Our job as employers, and business leaders, is to go beyond that “Hey I just need help, so let me have a body here” and begin to engage the hearts and the minds of the people who come onto our teams, so that they experience those things I spoke about just a few moments ago, of Happiness, of Belonging.

And that is where we can have increased performance and a sustainable competitive advantage.

So, if you got value from this short conversation then like or share. And I’d love to hear from you: your comments or questions. Then please enter those and I’ll get back to you just as quickly as possible. I’m not in here every hour of every day but I will get back to you.