I’m watching a smallish business in its death throes. There are about 50 employees, and I thought they might be able to turn it around, but the entire production team resigned, one after another. I don’t know if they will be able to persuade a couple to stay or if they will truly have to build from scratch, but I do know this type of mass exodus could have been prevented.
You may not be worried about employee retention. After all, it appears to be an employers’ market, with layoffs last week at Nike, Cisco Systems, and Instacart. With all these people hitting the job market, you may think you can just go on your merry way because if people quit you can just replace them. Easy peasy.
It’s the wrong approach. It’s one thing to have people quit now and then — and that can be healthy for your business — but you don’t want to be like this business, losing an entire department, and you certainly don’t want to lose even one of your top performers. Here are ways to approach retention even when you think you don’t need to worry about it.
To keep reading, click here: How You Can Avoid an Employee Mass Exodus
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Any company that puts customers in pedestals over functioning of their business doesn’t have people in charge who actually know how to run the business successfully. Yeah, you can be a concierge services provider but you also need to have employees who know how to handle constantly changing impulsive behavior decisions from your paying customers who don’t consider your employees as human but just service providers. You as the company’s CEO need to compensate your employees well enough and have more than adequate staff to match your picky customers. Especially if you claim to offer quality service versus adequate service. There’s a big difference and if you cut labor costs you just destroyed the service provided.
This! Evil HR Lady hit the nail on the head. I work for a very recognizable Fortune 500 and we have a huge engagement and retention problem. As a public company we do need to “do right” by our shareholders. However, company leaders have sacrificed their employees on the altar of “shareholder value” through back-to-back (unsuccessful) restructurings, laying off countless people who had the institutional knowledge to run our core business successfully. In the culling 2 years ago (before the present restructuring) leadership was caught flat footed by a mass exodus of employees on top of all the people they’d laid off. I’m a newer employee at the company and am a fresh pair of eyes—the culture at my company SUCKS. We’re treated like drones and not human beings. Sure, they talk the talk but don’t walk it. With the layoffs, people find themselves doing their full time job plus the full time job of the “exited” employee. When I pushed back on this unsustainable situation, I was advised to keep quiet about that lest I upset anyone who might be working 3 or more full time jobs. I currently have no life outside of the company and feel like they own me 24/7. They could definitely use some Evil HR Lady wisdom right now. Thanks for the informative post.