Page 15 - Retaining Top Employees

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“Employee What?!” 3

How can this be? How Employee retention A
can one seemingly term that means many
straightforward concept be things to many people,with
so many disparate, some- its meaning and means of achieving
times contradictory things? usually specific to each individual
The answer is because organization—and even to each man-
ager and each employee.
employee retention—effec-
tive employee retention—is
not some externally generated set of activities or metrics that
have a life of their own and that are applicable to every circum-
stance. As we will see throughout this book, effective employee
retention is something that is very specific to each individual
organization.
Two organizations in the same industry, making the same
product, in the same town, with the same labor pool and the
same customers and the same suppliers can see employee reten-
tion very differently, because of differing management styles and
different past experiences. Even within the same organization,
employee retention can mean something entirely different from
one division to another or from one manager to another. And
within any one division, under any one manager, what’s key to
keeping one employee may not be relevant to another.

Biotech vs. Burger Bar
What employee retention means to the biotech company
down the road,peopled with chemists and concerned with
R&D issues,is very different from what it means to the burger chain
franchise in the next street,employing students and facing speed-of-
production issues. And the way each company addresses it is neces-
sarily different as well.
The biotech company may think of employee retention primarily in
relation to a handful of key chemists whom they want to retain for a
period of years,while a product moves through its R&D cycle,through
testing and certification,and finally into marketing and sales. In con-
trast,the burger joint is likely to be concerned about retention prob-
lems across a much broader category of employees and with a time
horizon of months rather than years.