How to retain your best employees

The rules of employee retention have changed. No longer can loyalty be bought with big salaries, hefty bonuses, and rich benefits packages. Today it takes intangible, non-monetary rewards to create an atmosphere that makes your people feel valued, respected, and involved. It take a whole new way of thinking. This is the fifth edition of a 22-week special on ideas you could implement to keep those best employees:

5) Know Your Employees as People

It’s easy to look at your workforce as data processors, supervisors, or whatever their job may be. But it’s smarter to see them as parents, spouses, or music lovers. When you get to know your employees as people, you establish the emotional ties between employer and employee that are at the root of high retention. When you look past the job title to the person, you make employees feel as if they’re somehow more than disposable cogs in the machine.

Keep a file on each staff member and use it to store information on children, spouses, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, hobbies, outside interests, and so on. You can use this information in your daily inter-actions to make employees feel like an important part of your family. You can also use it as a basis for offering personal rewards that have special meaning for the recipient. Compare the potential impact of these rewards:

• Impersonal: “You’ve been doing a great job lately, and I wanted you to know I have nominated you for Employee-of-the-Month.”

Personal: “You’ve been doing such a great job lately, so why don’t you take an extra hour at lunch? I know your son’s birthday is coming up, and I thought you might need some time to go shopping for his present.”

• Impersonal: “For your hard work on the financial report, I’d like you to have this coffee cup imprinted with the company logo”.

Personal: “For your hard work on the financial report, I bought you the new CD from that band I know you like so much.”

These aren’t necessarily great examples, but you get the point. Know your employees, and understand that they are human beings, not a number. The “human touch” is always better!