Page 16 - Retaining Top Employees

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4 Retaining Top Employees

“No Generalization Is Worth a Damn ...”
“No generalization is worth a damn,including this one!”
Those words of caution—attributed to Mark Twain,
George Bernard Shaw,and Oliver Wendell Holmes—seem particularly
appropriate here.All the generalizations about employee retention,no
matter how wise,are worth little if you don’t apply them judiciously.
Every organization—and every department or division in every
organization—is a different environment for employee retention.
Additionally,within each organization,department,and division,cir-
cumstances will change from year to year,month to month,maybe
even from day to day,in such a way as to render your carefully con-
structed employee retention goals,strategies,and tactics either obso-
lete or at least in need of a good overhaul. If you know your environ-
ment and keep alert to changes,you can make the most of any gener-
alizations about employee retention.

So you will not find in this book (or elsewhere) one prescrip-
tive, generic answer to the question of employee retention, no
single plan that fits every situation. Instead, you will discover
how to define employee retention for yourself, for your organiza-
tion, and even for specific departments or divisions in your
organization. You will learn how to establish realistic, organiza-
tion-specific employee retention goals, how to select the right
strategies and tactics to attain those goals, and how to gauge
the success of those strategies and tactics. Finally, and most
importantly, you’ll learn how to monitor and vary your employ-
ee retention goals, strategies, and tactics over time, as your
organization’s circumstances change.

What “Employee Retention” Used to Mean

Let’s start by getting our definitions and vocabulary right. This
entails understanding just a little history.
The term “employee retention” first began to appear with
regularity on the business scene in the 1970s and early ’80s.
Until then, during the early and mid-1900s, the essence of the
relationship between employer and employee had been (by and
large) a statement of the status quo: