Page 197 - Retaining Top Employees

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The Role of the Manager, Part 2 185

Follow Your Alumni
The approach of encouraging top performers to move on
when the time is right and leaving the door open for them to return is
particularly effective for younger,homegrown “hotshots.” An employee
that you’ve developed internally will reach a point when he or she will
need to move on for personal and career development.After all,no
matter how great your organization is,a top employee will eventually
need to see how other organizations work and learn some new tricks.
In any case,natural curiosity will cause him or her to look around
sooner or later.
Many younger hotshots find out eventually that “there’s no place
like home” and,after taking a few years out,they’ll often think about
returning. So,keep the door open—and keep in touch.
tomorrow. Encouraging former employees to return is a rapidly
growing method of promoting retention. It produces two specific
retention-related benefits:

• A bigger recruitment pool. If you maintain an open door
policy for ex-employees and keep in touch with them
regularly, you’ve in effect opened a new channel for
recruiting top performers.
• A longer average stay. Employees who return typically
stay longer the second time around. They know what to
expect and they assimilate and acclimate more quickly.
Involve Alumni
You can go beyond simply keeping in touch with high perform-
ers who leave. Why not consider asking them to remain
involved in some way? When you can keep top alumni involved
(speaking at management retreats or other employee events,
serving as mentors for younger employees, or just attending an
occasional social event), that involvement delivers all the bene-
fits detailed above. And there’s one additional, important reten-
tion benefit: it minimizes “collateral losses.”
If your employees can continue to interact with their depart-
ed colleagues, it minimizes the separation distress and radically
reduces collateral losses.