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64 Retaining Top Employees

Don’t Get Fooled Again
A misperception has developed that Gen-Xers have a hugely
unrealistic perception of their worth in the marketplace.This
misperception is a direct result of the excesses of the dot-com era.
It’s not that Gen-Xers are unrealistic—they’re as capable as any-
body at working out median salary ranges—but that for a brief but
well-publicized period of time some high-profile employers paid unre-
alistically high salaries to Gen X employees.The fact that the Gen-
Xers happily took such salaries while they were available doesn’t mean
that everyone of a certain age now believes they’re worth more than
the marketplace will pay.
The Organizational Culture
Every organization—irrespective of size, industry, or location—
has its own culture. Organizational culture isn’t just composed
of grand things like vision, values, and a mission statement, but
it’s also (even more so) defined by “habits”—the ways in which
the organization does things, how its members communicate
and interact, and what’s expected and accepted and what’s not.
All employees (not just top performers) will naturally stay
longer with an organization where the culture makes them feel
at home, as opposed to a culture that’s threatening, overpower-
ing, or just plain “blah.”
In smaller organizations, culture is easier to control, because
it’s almost certainly a direct reflection of the attitudes and
beliefs of the founders. However, once an organization grows

Small Is Beautiful
Some organizations go to extremes to avoid developing a “big
company” culture. Inc. Magazine (a “must read” for anyone deal-
ing with retaining top employees in a small or medium-sized organiza-
tion) regularly presents reports and case studies on founders who
have stopped growing their companies for fear of losing an important
cultural ethic.
Meanwhile,for the same reason,Tetra Pak,one of the world’s
largest packaging companies,refuses to let any one site become larger
than 250 employees. It simply builds a new plant or campus when
employment at one location gets too high.