Page 57 - Retaining Top Employees

McKeown03.qxd 4/13/02 8:10 AM Page 45

Envisioning Your Retention Strategy 45

Institutional knowledge The knowledge and information
gathered by an organization that forms an integral part of its
asset base and that it uses to create value and make a profit
or otherwise fulfill its mission.
Institutional knowledge can be either trapped within the organiza-
tion (and therefore independent of any individual) or held by individu-
als (and therefore dependent on those individuals).As they’ve moved
away from the status quo relationship with their employees,many
organizations have discovered that their assets are now traveling up
and down in elevators and leaving the building every night.

(using a computer database or a buddy system, for example).
Example: The Unhappy Clients
Let’s return to Jones Painterman & Co., the accounting firm
with high turnover of senior tax managers. You’ll recall that the
underlying problem is not just the cost and effort of replacing
key employees, but the dissatisfaction expressed by clients who
must work with different managers. Reducing turnover will be a
great achievement for Jane, the partner in charge, but it won’t
solve her problem of unhappy clients. Even when she gets sen-
ior tax managers to stay with the firm, she’ll still have to deal
with unhappy clients if ever those tax managers are assigned to
other clients, get sick, or move to other duties within the firm.
To reduce the possibility of dissatisfaction, Jane might
include in her goals to design a system to give clients two sen-
ior points of contact—a tax manager and an assignment man-
ager, for example—to ensure continuity should the tax manager
leave the assignment for any reason.

Determining the Reasons for Retaining Top Employees
Finding out the underlying reasons can take some investigation.
It’s not always obvious if there’s a key operational issue involved,
apart from the resource and recruitment costs. It’s also seduc-
tively easy to focus on the resource and recruitment implica-
tions—cost of hiring, retraining, lost production or sales, etc.—
because these costs are usually readily obtained. However, for
your retention strategy to have maximum effect, it must isolate