Retain Top Talent

What a great idea for retention and employee engagement. You've probably noticed that I've been writing a lot about employee engagement, recognition, appreciation, happiness, and retention.

The job market is rapidly shifting from how do I find people to how do I keep my best ones from being poached.

A big part of engagement and retention is showing appreciation, gratitude, empathy, caring, and recognition.

What could be more simple than uploading your company logo to hallmark, using some standard cards and sentiments on the inside, and then writing a short note of appreciation?

You'll change your culture dramatically overnight for a just a few dollars. I use these hallmark cards on a regular basis with employees, consultants, non-profit volunteers, and customers.

What's holding you back from a few minutes to create custom appreciation cards - either online or formal printed cards? It's almost a no-brainer to invest 30-60 minutes to try this tactic.

Interesting article on the concept of "work marytrs" - those who feel the need to broadcast to others their excessive workaholic behavior.

I can appreciate this article having grown up in a few large competitive organizations like Beatrice Foods, Mattel, and Westinghouse where everyone seemed to be in competition for who was the bigger work martyr.

My question is whether there is some hidden agenda/cultural issue that drives some of your employees to feel the need to work excessive hours and then make sure everyone else knows they are doing it.

My experience of consulting with hundreds of companies on an annual basis for the past 30 years is that very few companies have an effective and robust non-monetary reward/recognition program covering such topics as praise, fun achievement awards, learning and development.

Although it's not possible to motivate employees, you can create an environment for self-motivation by showing your employees that you care and are appreciative when they knock it out of the park or act as a role-model in demonstrating one of your core values. Not having a robust program to show appreciation and gratitude means that your employees will not be motivated to do anything beyond the minimum expectation you tolerate to allow them to keep their jobs. How depressing!

Interesting perspective on employee engagement in a manufacturing environment. Gallup shows this group to be a little tougher to engage.

Although the article stays at a superficial level with recommending specific tactics, it does raise some good challenges to think about if you're in a manufacturing company.

Most companies on-boarding consists of filling out paperwork in HR. Here's an interesting take on getting employees off on the right foot and staying passionate. A Great on-boarding program is the start of ensuring high employee engagement.

The evidence of employee engagement is overwhelming when looking at metrics of improved customer satisfaction, net promoter scores, lower turnover, and fewer employees trying to see if the grass is greener somewhere else.

What's holding you back from implementing best practics in employee engagement - such as better definitions of success in jobs, non-monetary reward/recognition programs, and better performance management feedback?

Yes I know - the article is little edgy. I like edgy. I like shaking things up. I am not a status quo person. As you may know - I don't play nice with tribal approaches to hiring and retention.

What's the old saying - life imitates art or vice versa?

I am always looking to see how work life gets portrayed in comedy programs and stand-up. I really like Tina Fey's take on the whole work-life environment.

Just a few simple elements can dramatically affect your culture and employee engagement. A big one that most companies are terrible at is showing gratitude. You could pat people on the back, write emails, put them on a pedestal when they do something spectacular, and basically treat them with respect. 

Why do most managers struggle with showing gratitude toward their team members, and continue to be abusive, obnoxious, indifferent, mean, and dripping with sarcasm?

Chris makes a very good point here about the importance of listening and the correlation to engagement or disengagement - whether it be in team meetings, problem-solving sessions, or giving feedback.

My personal experience is that most managers/executives DO NOT know how to listen to employees. It's a learned skill. Many CEOs assume that their management team members must have decent listening skills since they carry a management title. NOTHING could be further from the truth.

If this is an important criterion for engagement, and it's a learned skill - why are we NOT training managers to be outstanding at listening?

Are you still stuck in a 1970s model of performance reviews? Most studies show these are worthless exercises to motivate, engage, and boost outstanding performance. If that's the case, why are you still conducting annual performance reviews?

This is a good article reviewing some of the research, problems, and issues of annual performance reviews, and the challenges of moving to a different model, such as regular monthly coaching one-to-ones between managers and subordinates.

It's bordering on comical when CEOs and executives say "why should I invest in training when I'm just preparing them for a job in another company".

Is this your philosophy about training and development? Or is your organization up on a pedestal for your investments in training and developing people? Have you done any formal survey work to discover why people join your organization or leave? How much is related to developing, training, coaching, and helping people realize their dreams?

Alarm bells should be ringing! Can you believe the statement in this article in Inc that a survey showed that 80 percent of the reason to leave a company was a lack of being patted on the back?

I've been talking about this simple idea of one element of employee engagement for years - yet out of 600-700 CEOs and executives that I present to annually - very few are doing anything substantial around employee appreciation and recognition.

As the job market continues to heat up over the next decade, be prepared for the exodus due to a lack of appreciation.

We can all agree with the article headline that there is a direct correlation between employee happiness and business success.

How do you focus in this area, particularly when surveys, such as the Gallup engagement survey, show that engagement, happiness, and satisfaction is less than 30%?

I liked the way the author of this article broke down 4 key areas to focus on to improve employee happiness: trust, health, recognition, and culture.

What initiatives are you currently implementing to focus on these 4 key areas?

Here's a novel idea (I'm kidding of course). When was the last time you sat down and painted a strong visual image of the path forward for your biggest contributors or most impactful employees? How detailed did you get in terms of time frame, money, responsibility, authority, impact, and expectations?

NOT having this conversation frequently is a recipe for the turnover of your best performers. Top talent wants to know what the future looks like - not platitudes and generic phrases - but hardcore specific time frames and expectations.

One of the key elements to employee engagement is recognition and appreciation. How many different ways does your company help build employee engagement? The article has 15 different ideas - which ones are doing and do you have a team looking in to the other suggestions?

In the next few years, it's going to be tough to keep your best peope from being poached unless you're doing most of these!

Another survey showing the importance of company culture. I'm not sure I would agree with the point about culture being the most important issue = but the percentages around employee satisfaction and engagement are pretty consistent with all the other surveys on this topic.

What's the risk of not taking action to improve your culture?

Have you ever done a cost analysis of the employee turnover - both employees who leave because they are disengaged and dissatisfied and the ones you fire because you made a hiring mistake?

Investing in improving your hiring and retention processes can have a dramatic cost implication - lost revenue, dissatisfied customers, non-renewal of agreements, new business that goes to your competitors, rework, poor quality, and lower than average productivity.

I'll bet once you put a dollar figure on the cost of turnover, you'll find it very easy to justify the time and investment to improve how you hire and retain people.

This idea about the power of headlines applies just as well to job advertising and networking messages. Why are still stuck on using the job title for a headline?

Of course, the job title is what it will be called on a regular basis once the person is hired. However, that's not what will catch the eye, interest, or passion of potential applicants.

Let's take a page from David Ogilvy and write headlines that attract candidates.

There is a strong link between performance management and employee engagement - particularly around the idea of defining clear expectations.

Why do so many companies ignore this fundamental element of both performance management and employee engagement? Is it too hard? Do they not know where to start? Do they not care?

Great infographic around employee engagement, happiness, and satisfaction. The free food one was a surprise - not sure I buy into that being important criteria - but the other items - right ON!

How can you begin an engagement program right now to stop your employees from thinking about "Is the grass greener somewhere else?"

The vast majority of your employees just don't care about their job, the company, or their teams. They are just coping with getting by each day doing the absolute minimum of work that you'll tolerate to allow them to keep their jobs.

This FORTUNE article is consistent with the primary research from Gallup on employee engagement, and most other studies.

What are you doing to combat this apathy, low productivity, and terrible attitude? Do you have a specific written engagement and retention plan to dramatically boost productivity, engagement, and employee satisfaction (remember - there is a direct correlation with employee engagement and productivity/customer satisfaction)?

Is now the time to start moving the bulk of your employees from the category of "I don't care" to "I care deeply?"

The author (whom I follow and respect) infers that this is a Google original idea. It's not! Furthermore, figuring this out in an interview is NOT a five-minute issue as the article headline proclaims. It takes hours to understand a manager/leaders ability to hire and retain a high performing team. There is NO simple solution or answer to get at it.

This is the core of the work that Gallup did and then published in their book "First Break All the Rules" (if you are in management this should be required reading - right after my book on hiring)

Almost all of the work in  HR, employee engagement, and retention stems from this groundbreaking research that Gallup did a number of years ago.

One of the most important elements of that entire research was the idea that employees want to know what is expected of them in measurable terms.

Would you say that every employee in your organization has clear, objective, measurable results, outcomes, metrics, deliverables that are written and agreed to by both the employee and their immediate manager?