Welcome to the final part of our series on employee retention. In this series we talked all about how to identify issues in your business that unnecessarily reduce employee retention. If you haven’t read part I or II, I encourage you to start with Part I here, and move on to Part II here.
Part I was about HR, and the necessity of having a means to handle employee disputes and issues reasonably and fairly. Part II was about benefits, and how they are a necessity for some employees. Finally, we’re going to talk about the third reason, which is that your business is not a good fit for that individual.
It’s Not You, It’s Me…Except When It’s You
The original title of this article was “Your Business Sucks”, which gets points for being edgy, but it’s not entirely accurate. While employees tend to leave certain businesses because they do suck, the situation is actually more complicated than that. It’s entirely possible that the business doesn’t suck, it’s not a good fit.
That said, you need to know if employees are leaving because it really is a bad fit, or if there’s a serious problem somewhere in the management of your business.
Look at Your Management
You need to constantly look at your management and make sure that it’s organized, fast, and effective. You want to make sure there is appropriate oversight so that employees feel safe knowing that someone is there if they need help without feeling like their every move is being watched.
You also want to make sure your employees are properly trained, and feel welcomed.
But most importantly, you need to have a good understanding of office culture and make sure you only hire individuals who fit that culture.
Office Culture
We have an old post on office culture, which you can explore here. That should take care of all the details on how to set up a strong sense of office culture. What we will say here is that every office has a culture. It’s a type of behavior that it’s centered towards.
When you’re hiring candidates for a job position, you want to make sure that you’re asking yourself if this individual is a good fit for the business. It’s your job to figure that out in the hiring process. If you’re hiring lots of folks who are not a good fit, then the office culture you have in mind, and the office culture in reality are different, and you need to work out those differences.
And of course, there’s one more topic we didn’t really talk about.
They Need More Money
Sometimes, you can pay folks what they deserve, sometimes they demand more than they deserve, or you can’t afford to keep them. It’s always a push and tug between what you can do and what everyone wants. So let’s just break this down.
- If you can afford to pay someone what they’re worth, pay them. It looks very bad for you when (not if) your employees figure out you’re willingly paying them less than they deserve.
- If you can’t afford to pay someone what they’re worth, give them more benefits
- If you can’t do that, find other parts of their life you can support, maybe education or skill growth.
- If they insist on being paid more than they’re worth, just give them your offer and let them take it or leave it as they like.
- Stay calm, friendly, and mature. They’re negotiating with you, it’s a regular part of the process.
Conclusion
And that wraps up our 3 part series. As you can see, this one was quite long, but I wanted to make sure our bases were covered. This doesn’t mean we’re done with the topic of employee retention though.
Some businesses are asking if employee retention is something you should even care about. Perhaps it’s better to have a constant influx of new individuals and new talent? After all, Amazon doesn’t care about retention at all, and they’re doing fine.
So look out for a blog post in the future about our take on this opinion, and why it’s terrible.