Page 194 - Retaining Top Employees

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182 Retaining Top Employees

monitor your employees:
• You: Take a reality check once a month or so. Does this
employee seem overly stressed or unusually touchy? If
so, it’s time to do more to enforce some work-life bal-
ance.
• Significant Other: Have an event once a quarter to which
significant others are invited (a barbecue, bowling, a ball
game, or whatever). Mingle with those significant others
and, believe me, if any of your employees are not main-
taining a reasonable work-life balance, you’ll soon hear
about it!
• Colleagues: Hard-core overachievers will find ways to
hide their problem from those around them. However, it’s
hard to do so for long. Watch and ask how your best
employees are relating to their colleagues (to whom
they’re exposed for the longest time) to identify employ-
ees who are covering up a
Don’t Snoop! work-life imbalance.
Please note that I am
not advocating that you Setting Milestones
snoop on your employees. Snooping In addition to monitoring
is when you surreptitiously sneak relationships, you can put
around trying to find out what’s going in place “balance mile-
on.You must deal with work-life
stones” that can be
issues openly and transparently: tell
your employees what you’ll be doing checked almost automati-
to help them maintain a reasonable cally. Set quantifiable
balance.They’ll thank you for it. milestones that can be
collated and scanned easi-
ly for trends that will indicate a possible problem with work-life
balance.
As with setting policies, the milestones you set will vary
depending on organizational and employee needs, but here are
some examples:
• Hours worked per week, month, and quarter.
• Hours worked outside normal working hours per week,
month, and quarter.