Page 37 - Retaining Top Employees

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The Secret’s in the Swing 25

As we saw in Chapter 1, retention strategies used to be
based on the status quo model. This assumed that there was a
“normal,” “acceptable” rate of employee retention and that low
retention rates were bad and relatively unusual. This is just like
my original view of the San Francisco traffic—“This is terrible,
and the sooner it gets back to normal, the better.”
Then time passes, with the same traffic problems, the same
loss of good employees, until you slowly realize that retention,
like the traffic on 101, is not going to get any better! It’s an
axiom of our age: “Constant change is here to stay.”
So the first and most important thing you can do is to
change the way you look at retention issues. Managing reten-
tion, like driving where I live, isn’t about stopping the traffic; it’s
about going with the flow. You can no more stop the mobility of
good people than I can hurry the traffic on Highway 101. Job
mobility is a function of upskilling and economic growth: you
cannot (and should not) stop it.

Think Like a Diner Owner
Once you accept that employee turnover is here to stay, that
job mobility is a given and no longer an aberration, the next
thing to do is to make your workplace attractive to people on
the move.
Think about a diner located along a busy highway, with all
those potential customers driving past. If the owner of the diner
is smart, what does she do? Simply wait for the customers to
stop? Of course not. She makes the diner attractive: she puts
up signs, she maintains the property, she puts out tables. She
does whatever it takes to bring in the customers.
Look around at your hiring practices, your publicity materi-
als, and your working environment. There are a lot of good peo-
ple out there who notice the presence and image of your com-
pany. Do they see a workplace that’s welcoming, that beckons
to them? Or do they see an environment that’s defensive, insu-
lar, preoccupied with not losing its employees?
Good employees are on the move, sure, but they’re on the
move to somewhere. Why not to your organization? What are