Page 14 - Retaining Top Employees

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2 Retaining Top Employees

term and you’ll receive 10 (sometimes very) different answers.
Answers like these:
• “Employee retention? You mean stopping people from
leaving this organization?”
• “Employee retention is all about keeping good people.”
• “Getting our compensation and benefits into line with the
marketplace.”
• “Stock options, crèche facilities, and other perks.”
• “It’s got to do with our culture and how we treat people.”
• “Staunching the high employee turnover we have in
department x or job function y.”
• “Presenting a consistent, effective employer proposition
across the entire employee life cycle, thus ensuring we
source, hire, manage, and develop employees who part-
ner with us in achieving our organizational goals.”
As you can see, managers’ perceptions of the meaning of
employee retention can vary from the mechanical (“Reduce this
employee turnover figure to an acceptable level”) to the
abstract (“It’s about our culture and values”). Definitions can be
couched in curt, wholly objective phrases or in flowery, vague
“corporate speak.” Some managers view employee retention as
a distinct, controllable element of labor management (“It’s a
matter of compensation and benefits”) and others consider it a
cross-functional, pervasive, and seemingly all-encompassing
set of values or methodologies (“It’s about our culture and how
we treat people”).
Which of all these “flavors and colors” of employee retention
is right?
Is employee retention any single one of the definitions cited
above? Is it a specific combination of two or more of those defi-
nitions? Is it something else entirely that we haven’t mentioned?
Well, the answer to all those questions is ... “Yes.”
Employee retention is each of the definitions cited above. It can
also be a specific combination of two or more of those definitions.
And it is some other things that we haven’t even mentioned yet.