"How to keep the best employees? ”,
“How to keep the best employees?”, “Why are they leaving?”, “Staff turnover: how to stop?” - a sound from a push notification instead of an alarm clock - a daily digest of the online management community is “served” for morning coffee. More than 10 years in management and all the same questions every morning ... I asked them at the beginning of my career, it hurt me to lose someone. “We invest in them, invest resources, train, develop, and then they leave to apply their knowledge and experience to competitors.” - business owners expressed their pain. They had a recognizable handwriting on the forums - abundant in punctuation marks - ellipses, multiple question and exclamation marks betrayed their emotions and despair.
Finding a solution
I believed that there was some secret knowledge and sought access to it everywhere.
In the HR community, this topic has always held top positions, involving it in an entertaining discussion: the old school insisted on the redistribution of compensation packages, the new era found answers in personality typologies. Growing like mushrooms, IT companies aggressively grabbed staff with "buns", cookies and design offices. PR services joined them - the market was filled with freshness from a new round of teachings about internal corporate communications.
Finding a solution was quite exciting, colleagues enriched with ideas, the fashion for retaining employees was globalized and digitalized. At the conferences, 3 magic words sounded from the stage - attrition, retention, engangement, and those who were more resourceful made capital by selling trainings on motivation systems. An invaluable contribution to the dynamic development of knowledge in the field of staff retention was provided by the money of the owners, which abundantly fertilized experiments in cultivating and breeding human loyalty. But people kept leaving, and the forums were still full of punctuation marks.
I would have studied the context further, but the lack of time often forced me to act quickly.
"What would you like to get from the company to stay here for a long time?"
From my question, the person was confused: "It's strange, no one has ever asked me about this."
Really weird, we don't even ask people. That's so straight. We are trying to find some approaches, look for hidden meanings, asking abstruse questions or making our own assumptions.
Usually they need development.
Traffic. Change of states. Height. Career, financial, personal. And the ability to manage this development.
Often they themselves don't know. And here the task takes on a completely different character - to help a person understand, inform, give a choice from the opportunities that exist in the company, or create such opportunities. It does not always work out, it happens that the paths diverge.
As if it were an unspoken contract.
Opportunity for loyalty. And if she's not there, why don't we admit it honestly? Yes, this person will surely leave, and we will certainly find a replacement for him. Earlier. Without wasting time and resources on diagnostics, experiments and round dances. Why are we so afraid to let go?
I started asking one question - "What do you want for yourself?"
I stopped holding and started to let go.
I have ceased to be afraid that they will leave - the sooner we understand that the paths have diverged, the faster we will work out the risks and find a solution. People are free in their choice, they value those who admit it.
Suddenly, people stopped leaving and started helping to create opportunities for their development. Those who left earlier began to return. Motivation trainings have ceased to be valuable as unnecessary. Only the mailing continues to arrive every morning.
***
This story is about simple and honest solutions.
Sometimes they are paradoxical and you need the courage to admit it and start doing it differently. Sometimes this is a big risk.
Have you had to learn to let go and what did it lead to?
