According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the best way to keep your top executives is to make it easier for them to leave.
When the economy rebounds, if your employees aren’t happy, they will leave.
That’s right — offer them challenges, enhance their skills, expand their networks.
Perhaps that would have made perfect sense 30 years ago, when taking a job often meant staying with a company for the duration of your career. But today, when job-hopping is standard and one-company careers are a relic, grooming employees just doesn’t seem prudent.
But it is, and even more so in an economic recession. (When the economy rebounds, if your employees aren’t happy, they will leave.) Consider the article’s points, and apply them to employees at any career stage, from entry-level to C-suite.
Offer challenges: In the WSJ survey, the opportunity to work on challenging tasks and to take on new responsibilities ranked as the most important factor in career satisfaction. It’s no wonder: Any employee worth keeping will not find contentment in stasis.
Build skills: Taking on new responsibilities usually requires some level of technical training and support. Employees cannot thrive if they aren’t given the tools.
Encourage networking: In the survey, researchers asked respondents which opportunities on the job were the most important and if they were satisfied with what their employers were giving them. Out of all the questions, “expanding professional network” ranked the lowest in satisfaction.
In other words, if you go by what this survey’s respondents say, workers today are not being given the opportunity to share knowledge with their peers.
The researchers add that “… Executives intend to stay the longest with those companies that offer the greatest opportunities to enhance their employability.”
Keep that in mind when you are thinking twice about whether to include training in your IT budget.
MORE INFO IN: Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps
About Jenny Sweeney
[...] Read a related post: “Employee Retention 101.” [...]