Going back through some older emails from the office, I found this from ASAE’s Greater Washington Network e-newsletter:
When your employees leave, they leave for more money. At least that’s the story they give as they head out the door according to a new survey from the Society for Human Resource Management and CareerJournal.com, which notes that "better compensation" is the reason most often cited by exiting employees. That’s only part of the story, however. Opportunity will find some people, but, usually, people find the opportunity—which means there is something about their current situation that has them looking. According to the same survey, 76 percent of workers are looking for new opportunities. The best way to keep them working for your organization is to keep them cozy. A competitive salary structure is your first and best option—it’s hard for most people to leave for less money. However, the survey notes that employers have several other weapons for their arsenal, including career development opportunities, promoting good workers, and flexible work schedules.
On first blush, I figured that this was the same old data that we keep seeing: the keys to employee retention are better pay, more training, greater understanding of work/life balance, etc., etc. Yet, I wonder why we keep reading these statistics and recommendations as if its new information. If these things really are the keys to solid retention efforts, why don’t they get put into play more? Are companies too unyielding or too resistant? Or perhaps companies do offer the kind of salary, career development, promotion, and flexibility options that employees want and they just aren’t enough.
Here’s my wager: they are not actually the true keys. They are merely band-aids applied to make us managers and executives feel better. They don’t address the real, core problems of the organization. Peter Block, in Stewardship, has influenced me to keep digging deeper into the relationship each of us has with our work. Peter writes:
The problem we face is that the organizational forms we have inherited and internalized do not nurture the realization of security, freedom, service. In fact, we’ve lost faith that these questions can be answered at the workplace. We have come to believe that to be productive in the marketplace we have to sacrifice our freedom, place our security in the hands of others, and bootleg our wish to be of service.
What would happen if we started offering our employees a true "grown-up" environment in which they could seek these three qualities? What would happen if we stopped trying to play the "good parent" by coming up with more ways to earn our employees’ love and devotion? And what would happen if we all stopped looking for our organizations to take care of all of our needs? Just maybe we’d finally have something new to talk about.
