Page 17 - Retaining Top Employees

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“Employee What?!” 5

You come work for me, do a good job, and, so long as
economic conditions allow, I will continue to employ you.
It was not unusual for people who entered the job market as
late as the 1950s and ’60s to remain with one employer for a
very long time—sometimes for the duration of their working life.
If they changed jobs, it was usually a major career and life deci-
sion, and someone who made many and frequent job changes
was seen as somewhat out of the ordinary.
As a natural result of this “status quo” employer-employee
relationship, an employee leaving his or her job voluntarily was
seen as an aberration, something that shouldn’t really have
happened. After all, the essence of “status quo” is just that little
or nothing should change in the relationship—and leaving was a
pretty big change!
So, in the 1970s and later, as job mobility and voluntary job
changes began to increase dramatically, the “status quo” model
began to fray substantially at the edges. Employers found them-
selves with a new phenomenon to consider: employee turnover.

The Rise of Employee Retention as a Management Tool
As organizations began to feel the impact of the rise of volun-
tary employee turnover, so a matching management tool began
to be developed—employee retention.
In this earliest, simplest form, employee retention was the

Employee turnover Percentage of the workforce who left
the organization in any particular period. If,for example,an
organization employed an average of 100 people during one
particular year and 45 of them left (for any reason) during that year,
the theoretical employee turnover rate for that year would be 45%.
In practice,managers are mostly concerned in gauging the rate of
voluntary departures—employees who choose to leave of their own
free will. People may leave the organization for many other reasons—
retirement,ill health,firing,or enforced redundancy.These “involuntary
separations” are usually excluded from the calculation of the employee
turnover rate,thus allowing the organization to concentrate on the
controllable reasons for employees leaving.