How do I keep staff?

September 19, 2010
Filed under: Coach's Corner — Tags: , , , — jonimar @ 2:41 pm

Q: I’m having nightmares about coming to work only to find I have no staff left. My company laid off 1/3 of our workforce, and has a wage and hiring freeze so everyone is doing double duty. My staff is overworked, overwhelmed and threatening to leave. How can I hang onto them?

A: A Right Management survey found 54 per cent of U.S. organizations lost key leaders in the first half of 2010. Replacing these people is more costly than investing in them.

Keep your brightest in house by valuing them. Give them complete credit for their ideas, solutions and results. If there are no bonuses or raises, find other creative ways to recognize them. They need to believe their work makes an important contribution to the company. Prove it does and celebrate their efforts.

Reinforce job security and foster loyalty by creating a growth plan that can lead to future promotions. Give staff the tools they need to succeed by investing in their professional development.

Enhance their performance with leadership coaching or training. You may not be able alleviate their stress, but you can reduce it by creating a positive environment.

Be their advocate. Remove unnecessary obstacles and streamline tasks so they can more easily achieve their targets. Acknowledge personal sacrifices.

Give them more control. Autonomy to get their jobs done their way will empower, motivate and satisfy them. Focus on their outcomes not on how they accomplish them. Intuit’s founder Scott Cook discovered “people will work nights — weekends — because it’s their idea.”

Share decision making with your employees. When people are consulted about things that affect them they are more apt to stay.

Originally printed in The Province, September 19, 2010.

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