Employee Retention Tips

There's an interesting new article over at HumanResourcesJobs.com that weighs investing in your workplace through employee education versus through perks like an on-site fitness center – and even bonuses.

While this piece concentrates almost entirely on the educational (tuition reimbursement) side, and therefore is not balanced in terms of listing the pros of company perks, I still think the writer makes a strong case.  By paying as much as $75,000 to help an employee earn a college degree, "The organization gets to keep and nurture an existing employee, making them more productive, useful, and loyal, and avoids the need to use recruiters or search firms and then assimilate a new employee."

The payoff of employee engagement and increased competitive advantage factor into the writer's final summation on the value of a company's educational investment in its workforce:

Organizations that are positive, encouraging, and supportive of employees who are trying to better themselves will have lower turnover rates, make more money and have a better public reputation than those who don’t.  The cost of tuition reimbursement programs is small compared to the benefit and a more liberal approach to tuition reimbursement and on-going education, especially when recruiting new college grads, is a powerful recruiting tool.  It’s a way to differentiate your organization from others.

The cost here is indeed small.  The over half of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award applicants that offer educational assistance reimburse tuition per employee by an average of just over $2,500 annually.  What they get from this and their other investments to create a productive workplace includes:

• Average annual reveue of $21 million
• Average revenue growth of 151% over the last three years
• Average annual turnover of 14%

(Source)

I think when you consider two of the chief cons of company perks like that fitness center that the article above mentioned – investment to educate that it's there, and more substantially to track its usage/ROI – the benefit of educational assistance makes even more sense.

How does education factor into your people practices spending?  And what impact has it had on retaining top talent?

Will this be the decade in which the employee engagement activity of flexible work arrangements becomes systematized and pervasive across companies and countries?  2009 gave us a nod squarely in that direction, as human capital strategies consultant and author Dr. Sandy Burud writes on the Sloan Network Work and Family Blog today.

In both 2009 and 2010, four out of five of our Top Small Company Workplace award applicant firms report flexible work arrangements among their employee benefit offerings.  To provide you with some solid employee retention tips, check out these 18 top, specific flex work practices our 2010 applicants are using:

1. Employees can adjust schedules to leave early to accommodate childcare pick-up or attend evening classes.
2. Offer weekend work to allow hourly employees to earn extra hours if they missed a day but have used up all their personal time.
3. Managers can telecommute and/or work evening or weekend hours to accommodate personal responsibilities.
4. Religiously observant employees can opt to work a company holiday and take their own religious holiday off with pay.
5. Host our own IT services such as VPN servers, email, webmail, and intranet with a focus on "any user" "anywhere" "anytime" so that users have full and easy access from all remote/mobile locations.
6. Flexible arrival and departure times allow employees to arrive late or leave early with notice to supervisors in order to attend to personal matters.
7. Variable lunch hours.
8. Allow employees to split duty in divergent job descriptions in order to satisfy their personal needs for challenging work.
9. 100% telecommuting option.
10. Mothers and/or fathers with infants are able to work from home up to 80% of the time.
11. Average full-time employee work week of 30-35 hours.
12. Job-sharing including a reduced work schedule and cross-training to cover team members on "off days."
13. Flex Fridays in the summer during which employees may leave the office at 1 pm on Fridays after working a compressed schedule earlier in the week.
14. Three shifts available to work.
15. Pets are allowed at work.  Children are allowed in certain instances and in case of need.
16. Managers are trained to accommodate flexible work arrangement requests, and systems for accountability and communication are in place to facilitate successful flexible work arrangements.
17. Offer laptops and mobile phones with email to support people working where and when they need to so they can prioritize family/personal time.
18. Staff is allowed to work four, 10-hour days due to weather, travel or family/personal conditions with approval from the leadership team.

Related: Two Winning Workplaces Best Bosses shared how flexibility factors into their strategies for a more productive workplace in this webinar.

If you're reading this, you probably understand and place stock in the link between great employee engagement and a thriving, productive workplace culture.  Great people practices can maximize a company's internal performance.

But then there's that pesky, all-important external performance – particularly against larger competitors that can outspend you in everything from advertising to inventory to recruiting.  What's a small business to do?

Luckily, there are tried and true ways to beat back bigger competitors.  Our friend Becky McCray shared four of these this week over at Small Biz Survival.

Her second one centers on the intrinsic value of a cohesive work culture:

You have a better connection with what your people want, how they like to be treated, and what touches their emotions than any big company can.

Becky's right.  As we have seen time and time again with our Top Small Workplace award winners, a highly effective culture has powerful implications on employee retention, which directly affects customer retention and satisfaction – two factors that often drive the bulk of revenues for small firms.  (Just look at our 2007 winner Gentle Giant Moving.)

Incidentally, the effectiveness of Becky's #1 and #4 methods can be enhanced when #2 (culture) is firing on all cylinders.

Related: This post explains another benefit of top tier work cultures: increased likelihood of surviving multiple economic downturns.

My congratulations to Brett Farmiloe on the release, today, of his book Pursue the Passion.  The title is shared by Brett's company, a venture that for the last few years has focused on helping people – especially Millennials – "think differently about career paths."

Why this focus?  The truth is, with Millennials (also known as Generation Y) becoming the largest generation in the workforce this year – and with as many as 70% of them considering leaving their current employer when the economy improves, according to a recent survey in Newsweek – employers have an opportunity obligation to learn how best to engage employees and spur team building in this age group.  This book provides insights from their perspective on how best to do this.

I was first introduced to Brett and PTP in 2007 when I designed an ad for my brother, Dan, who speaks to young people about networking and job hunting, for placement on the PTP site.  I've been impressed with their work and growth ever since, especially their ability to whip up a crowd on Facebook.  So beyond young employee retention tips, I think PTP – the book and the company – offers social media marketing lessons for small business leaders.

Order a copy of Pursue the Passion for yourself, or as a gift for someone you know, here.

If you missed Winning Workplaces' annual conference last October in Chicago, you can get a taste of what attendees experienced by watching the video below.  Especially noteworthy from an employee engagement research perspective is the section from :37 - 1:48, which describes the nomination, application, and judging process we undertook to select the 15 Top Small Workplaces that were honored at the event.

Check it out (if you can't see the video in your blog feed, click here):

In terms of the payoff of employee engagement activities, I love Bernie Dyme of Perspectives Ltd's definition of the ROI of a great workplace (starting at 5:38):

When people are so engaged in what they're doing and their employer that they want to be there no matter how bad the economy or the situation.  They're going to be there even when things are good after they're bad.

When it comes to employee retention tips and other strategies for greater workforce effectiveness, what would you like to see us cover in an event format this year?

I hadn't thought about the childhood saying "Finders keepers, losers weepers" since, well, childhood.  I was reminded of it again today when I came across this post on the Assessment Competency blog by business strategy consultant and leadership speaker Gregory P. Smith.

The expression is an apt one when it comes to companies' efforts to engage employees to increase employee tenures and reduce turnover to boost competitive advantage.

Deftly addressing the trials and tribulations of leading a multi-generational workforce and assigning hard costs to turnover, Smith provides a baker's dozen employee retention tips that your organization should consider adopting ensure the right people are "on the bus":

1. Hire the best and avoid the rest.
2. Provide flexible work schedules adapted to the needs of the individual.
3. Get rid of the slackers and whiners.
4. Soft skills are becoming the hard skills.
5. If they can't "move up" they will "move out."  (A case for employee leadership development.)
6. *Create an early warning detection system.
7. *Create an alumni program.
8. Look for triggers.
9. Take the temperature of your workforce.  (We offer one way to do this here.)
10. Complete an Individual Retention Plan on your best employees.
11. Focus on the family.
12. Identify and weed out poor managers.
13. *Adopt your employees.

I placed an asterisk (*) next to practices that are particularly innovative and "outside the box."  Who knows – they might work best for your workplace.

Are you using any of these engagement activities in your firm?  If so, which have delivered the best ROI?

I enjoyed this BNET article by Silicon Valley marketing and strategy consultant Steve Tobak on the top 10 lies managers tell themselves.  While many of them involve customers and executives above them in the company, Tobak's #5 lie deals with employee engagement best practices.

He says a common misconception is that subordinate employees "love" their managers.  This might be the most destructive falsehood on Tobak's list, as it's widely accepted that while employees don't necessarily quit companies, they definitely quit people.

The other part of the equation, in my mind, is that managers are already incredibly burdened – some would say overburdened – in their workplace role.  They're like a candle being burned at both ends: from below if a company is mediocre to poor on employee retention, which means more training and retraining on their part; and from above with owners and leaders relying on them heavily to execute core activities to keep the business in the black, or to keep growth strong.

Managers owe it to their sanity as well as their and their company's performance to get the best read possible on what their subordinates are thinking.  This includes their treatment of them and how well they seek and act on subordinates' good ideas from the latter's perspective.

This retention quiz Winning Workplaces developed a couple years ago is a good way to get started along this path.   We have other solutions for you, too – ask us about them by giving us a shout out.

So remember, one of the best employee retention tips out there is for managers to engage employees to get a better pulse on what they think about them.

When you think about both recruiting and employee retention tips to attract and keep top talent next year, who is the most common job candidate you're bound to meet or manage?

Signs point to a female Millennial (or Generation Y – born between the mid 1970s and the late 1990s).

As these two articles note, 2010 is a turning point for both Millennials and women, who are set to become dominant in the workforce.

On a related note, currently women are not the dominant gender among applicants for Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine's 2010 Top Small Workplaces competition.  As of today, the firms are 43% female : 57% male employees.  But there's still time for this to shift: the application deadline is January 22, 2010.

We don't ask about employee age range in our application so we don't have any data to share on that.

What are you doing as part of investing in your workplace to cater to young, female employees who will likely be most dominant in the workforce next year?

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

I was reminded of all the tools at small business' disposal that are often essential to screen for problem employees when I came across this article from the latest issue of Professional Carwashing & Detailing.  (One of Winning Workplaces' 2009 Top Small Workplaces is a carwash based in Indiana.)

Attorney Lester Rosen lists the following as screening measures that businesses in this industry should take to avoid needing to spend more down the road in recruiting and retraining – which can apply to firms in any industry:

• Screening for criminal records, often outsourced to qualified firms
• Social security number traces
• Driving record traces
• Checking federal and/or state civil records
• Resume verification, including contacting past employers

These are all important in today's recruiting environment where, as Rosen shares, as many as 30% of resumes contain falsified information.  But one measure that costs nothing more than time may be your most effective one.

Many of the small businesses that Winning Workplaces has named as Winners and Finalists of our Top Small Workplaces award use their small size to their advantage at a pivotal moment in recruiting – when the final decision needs to be made on a job candidate from the short list after skills tests are completed and multiple hiring interviews have been conducted.

For example, as Bailard Inc. CEO Peter Hill told me in an interview I did with him last week for our upcoming Success Story on the 2009 Top Small Workplace, they have a hiring committee made up of employees from all areas of the company.  He said that all committee members must be in agreement on a candidate before an offer is made.  One "Nay" vote and the process slows until everyone eventually comes together around the right person for Bailard's workplace culture of communications team building.

This, of course, defines the first part of the recruiting mantra I've mentioned before, "Hire slow, fire fast."

Do you require a unanimous team decision before making an offer in your organization?  What other employee retention tips do you recommend?

While it's easier said than done financially, at the end of the day it's an ROI no-brainer: One of the best employee retention tips is to pay workers over the minimum wage.

This is going to come across as a "duh" statement to many business leaders reading this.  After all, you found this blog by searching for "team building," "workplace culture," or a similar term, which means you're very likely already drinking the Kool-Aid of the payoff of employee engagement – an assumption of that being paying people fairly.

But there is still a need to say this.  One reason why is because wage theft is incredibly rampant, even in a time of increased scrutiny of businesses and a wealth of legal resources for employees who can prove they've been shortchanged.  This post on Today's Workplace, for instance, charts the number of wage theft incidences just in Chicago.

Some time ago, Winning Workplaces Chairman Ken Lehman weighed in on the need to always pay above the minimum wage in an editorial.  Here was his justification:

Employers owe it to their workforces to show their commitment to them by paying them a sufficient living wage.  Many workers, especially low-income workers, are only one paycheck, one health care episode or one bad experience away from losing everything.  If one of those situations occurred, who could blame a worker for not having his or her mind be totally on the work?  The result would be a loss of productivity for the enterprise.

Therefore, paying workers a decent wage is not a zero-sum game.  Instead, it's a win-win scenario that improves employees' peace of mind and, consequently, the bottom line of organizations.

Echoing Ken is Ross Blake of workplace consultancy Employee Retention Manager.  In this post, Blake calculates the savings of only a 5% increase over the federal minimum wage, in terms of the turnover cost incurred, as almost $2,200 per employee!

So if you want to attract and retain top talent, and enjoy the competitive advantage you'll have from those folks working for you and not for your peers, purge "minimum wage" from your vocabulary.

What's your perspective here?

I don't know about you, but I find the use of "fail" and "epic fail" on the Internet to describe, as Wikipedia puts it, "unsuccessful events or people falling short of expectations" incredibly grating.

Here are two examples of this phenomenon related to business:

• FAIL Blog
• Business Spotlight (a German source, proving this is a worldwide trend)

Besides the fact these terms are rather lazy ways to depict something tried that didn't quite work out – if you really think it's that bad, give more justification than just a big "FAIL" watermark or all-caps label – I disagree with the whole premise of focusing on the bad.  We have a whole host of entities, from governmental watchdog groups to news agencies, that are there to point out when things go wrong, and why.

This is why Winning Workplaces has endeavored to point out the good ("SUCCESS") when it comes to the nexus of small business and employee engagement performance.  When you peruse our library of over 100 Success Stories, for instance, you're going to glean employee retention tips and other practices that make for a more profitable, productive workplace.

If you run a business, your time is extremely limited.  So while it's important to learn the pitfalls to avoid, doesn't it make more sense to concentrate on what has worked for others that might work for your company?

What do you think?

You may have seen this week that Forbes published a list of "The Most Influential Business Thinkers."  On it are the likes of Harvard Business School's Gary Hamel, Virgin empire-builder Richard Branson, and Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs (who is teenagers' most admired entrepreneur according to a Junior Achievement survey).

But the Forbes list, which also includes Bill Gates and Malcolm Gladwell, is made up of visionaries that most everyone in the small business community has heard of before.  What I think would be more valuable for these leaders is a list of influential thinkers that are their peers, and who have received less attention by the mainstream business press.

So, based on Winning Workplaces' research and events that reveal the payoff of employee engagement and team building strategies, I've compiled our own Top 10 list.  Check out these small business rock stars if you haven't already:

1. Andrew Field, President, PrintingForLess.com.  Street cred: Created the first and largest online printing company.  If you go to their website and click on About Us you'll find several videos that show how PFL's culture of ownership translates to better service, higher sales, and employee retention and community-building in rural Montana.
2. Larry O'Toole, CEO, Gentle Giant Moving Company.  Street cred: Created a $30 million moving and storage business that has carved out a solid territory on the East Coast against stiff competition based on a service model that has inspired the likes of College Hunks Hauling Junk and Meathead Movers.
3. Jan Blittersdorf, CEO, NRG Systems.  Street cred: The employee benefits offered by this Vermont-based wind energy company align with its mission and values, and thus help attract top talent.  They include cash incentives for purchasing hybrid vehicles and energy-efficient home appliances.
4. Paul Silvis, Founder, Restek Corporation.  Street cred: If you're looking for the story of someone who had the product know-how but had to learn business leadership skills from scratch, Silvis is your guy.  After leading Restek to over $47 million in sales and several mentions on the Inc. 500, he is now heading up a new company, SilcoTek.
5. Diane Hessan, President, Communispace.  Street cred: Hessan is brimming with leadership lessons – see this post from yesterday – after leading her company, which provides online customer communities, back from the brink in 2001.  The firm has been trendsetting when it comes to flex-work and communications team building practices.
6. Dev Patnaik, Managing Principal, Jump Associates.  Street cred: On a recent kick of helping companies use the quality of empathy to their strategic advantage, Patnaik could just as easily conduct a master class on small business team building.  From their employee gatherings to their open workspace, this business consultancy exemplifies how best to harness innovation.
7. Trish Karter, CEO, Dancing Deer Baking Company.  Street cred: Dancing Deer is often cited as a model company when it comes to pursuing a double bottom line.  And for good reason: from economic development in their hometown of Boston to using product sales to end family homelessness, few organizations better demonstate that you can do well while doing good in the world.
8. Mike Faith, CEO, Headsets.com.  Street cred: Faith's company, only 11 years old, is a major player in the $2 billion U.S. headsets industry.  In large part this is because their people have taken the Jim Collins approach and do one thing really well: listening.  This includes to employees as much as customers.
9. Graham Weston, Chairman, Rackspace Hosting.  Street cred: The story of Rackspace's phenomenal growth based on delivering "Fanatical Support" to its customers is even more astonishing when you realize Weston has career roots in the decidedly non-tech space of real estate.  Customer satisfaction is a must in both fields, of course, and Rackspace continues to define it in their industry.
10. Tensie Whelan, Executive Director, The Rainforest Alliance.  Street cred: Whelan leads the only nonprofit on this list, but its an instructive one when it comes to running one like a business, and defining and serving an unmet niche.  They've fulfilled their mission and kept turnover low by helping to improve the sustainable practices – and profitability – of brands such as Chiquita.

For more info on all 10 of these small business thought leaders, visit our website and enter any of their names or companies in the search box.

Book-ending Winning Workplaces' annual conference earlier this month, at the tail end of the event, was Diane Hessan.  Hessan is President of Communispace, a Massachusetts-based provider of online customer communities for big companies, and a Best Boss.

The theme of her keynote address was "lessons learned in building an enterprise."  I am posting the 10 lessons she shared, which encompass employee retention tips and other people practices, below.  As her discussion solicited feedback from attendees, I'm also including two lessons they provided.

Learning hat on?  OK then...

1. Do not fall in love with your own idea – Keep listening and questioning.
2. Customers are everything – Get great ones early; have them serve as references.  If they help you build your business tell them that you will be their best customer.
3. Look for serendipity – Business plans are only so useful.  Pay attention to what shows up through the changes.  Keep your head up and do what you love.
4. Hire passionate people – Give them what they need; it allows you to play “full out.”  Our scare resource is not time, it is energy.
5. Communicate constantly – She shared this innovative practice with attendees that we've mentioned before.
6. Learn to be a great salesperson – If you have a product and can’t sell it, it's not a product but a hobby.  Many people think they are not great salespeople, but they are.
7. Make it a great culture – It is your brand.
8. You don’t have to be brilliant to sell great, just “smart enough” – Help others to be smarter.  Have them practice, it will hurt less.
9. Relish the tough times – She quoted Warren Buffett: "It is only when the tide goes out that you know who is naked."  It is easy to stay put, so get dirty.
10. Focus on building an amazing company – She also quoted Seth Godin: “There is no business as usual.”

Here are the two attendee lessons:

1. Celebrate accomplishments along the way – monetarily and non-monetarily.
2. Expand your stakeholders (mentors, customers, shareholders, suppliers).  They will also share in your success.

If you think someone on your team or in your network would benefit from these employee engagement ideas, you can share them by using the button below.

Looking for what stood out to attendees of Winning Workplaces' annual conference, The ROI of Great Workplaces, held in Chicago at the start of October?  Based on the attendee feedback we've received to date to the question "What did you find most valuable about this event?" I used Wordle to create the following tag cloud:

Here are some specific pieces of feedback we received that address the team building stories and employee retention tips that made up the content of this event:

• "The Keynote Speaker on Thursday afternoon was very inspring.  I enjoyed his presentation and found much information related to our technology business.  Also the Shackleton leadership experience was beautifully presented and incredibly powerful."
• "Meeting others who have either created or reported about workplaces with employee engagement best practices."
• "Witnessing the benefit of an engaged workforce in multiple disciplines."
• "The speakers, facilitators, and attendees were all the best at their business.  The caliber of all of the people involved was extremely high."
• "Interesting speakers, lots of opportunity to network with fellow attendees, and extremely well organized and executed by a caring and very professional staff.  Not a moment was wasted during this 27 hour event."

For more information on the ROI takeaways from this event, be sure to visit and bookmark http://roiofgreatworkplaces.com.  Currently this link points to our homepage, but we'll have special conference-related content posted here soon.

Today Management-Issues asks the question that's the topic of this post.  Here's the reasoning behind it, according to Marcia Xenitelis:

One of the things that continues to surprise me is that when times are bad, organizations still spend money on employee engagement surveys.  What are they expecting these surveys to tell them?  You only need to walk around the office or factory and listen into some tea room discussions to find out that employees are not engaged because they are worried about their jobs.

Certainly there's a lot of merit in the MBWA (managing by walking around) that Xenitelis advocates business leaders do.  A while back we wrote an editorial largely on the subject.  It's simply vital to creating a workplace culture of communications team building that we believe is a core building block among Winning Workplaces.

Yet, to stop surveying employees because poor sales make budgets leaner is akin to plugging one ear with your finger.  I would make the counterpoint that especially in times like these, leaders and managers need to have their finger – maybe the one they would have used to plug that ear – on the pulse of their organization.

That means soliciting employee feedback on what's working in the company, as well as what's not – even if you think negative responses will be needlessly weighted toward organizational reactions to a bad economy, such as reduced hours or pay.

I have more than my opinion backing me up on this:

• I wrote yesterday about the employee feedback we gather as part of our Top Small Workplaces recognition project.  Had we not included an employee survey component in our review of the 2009 applicants, both the reporting on this year's winning firms in The Wall Street Journal and our individual critiques of applicants who ask us how they're doing would have suffered.
• We almost always include an employee opinion survey when we engage clients through our workplace consulting and training practice.  We have seen that our clients that conduct these surveys in good times and bad (whether or not they turn to us for this every year) have better long-term success when it comes to employee retention, turnover, productivity, and bottom-line growth.
• Many established players in workplace research circles, such as the Wharton School and Towers Perrin, have concluded that using best practices to continually listen to and keep employees engaged leads to greater company earnings.  We list a few examples of these on our website.

What's your answer to the question Management-Issues proposes?

Even if Wall Street says otherwise, we're still clearly in an era of companies becoming leaner as they struggle to survive.  In no area of management is this more apparent, perhaps, than employee benefits.  Here are three news articles I picked up from Google News today, among many, that reflect this trend.

Which may be why The Wall Street Journal's reporting on our 2009 Top Small Workplaces from yesterday already ranks on page one of Google News results for "employee benefits cuts" – because these companies are bucking the trend.

This chart, comparing the 2009 winning organizations to the 2008 winners, shows that while they are paying on average a good deal less of medical premiums for employees' dependents, when it comes to employees themselves there is a slight increase in the share of premiums for which the companies pay:

Also, in a theme we have seen play out in the employee development strategies our past Top Small Workplaces have shared with our network, preparing workers to be leaders in their organizations continues to be a central leadership focus – one leaders and HR folks see having a direct impact on productivity and employee retention.  The amount that our winning firms reimburse for annual tuition assistance has gone up a whopping 17%, on average, over the past year:

I also compared winner data from 2009 to 2008 on annual paid time off, wellness programs, and flexible work arrangements, but they are statistically even.  Maybe keeping dollars toward these three benefits the same, instead of reducing them given the economic climate, is saying something.

How does your business compare to the 2009 Top Small Workplaces when it comes to employee medical premiums paid and tuition assistance?  Do you have any strategies to improve employee engagement when it comes to implementing benefits?  

Recently I cited HR blog Cheezhead and U.S. News & World Report in warning business leaders that they need to take a fresh look at their people practices for improving employee retention to avoid losing their best workers to organizations in other countries.

This past weekend The Huffington Post provided more clear evidence that this focus should be moved from leaders' "rainy day" to-do lists to the top of their agenda.  The site reported that China is quickly moving up the short list of countries that are attractive to U.S.-based workers because its government

1. will create millions of new jobs this year, while at the same time
2. it has reduced the time involved in granting a locally based company permission to hire a foreign worker – 15 days on average, a lot less time than this process takes in other countries

While the HuffPost article notes that it can still be difficult for foreign job seekers looking for work in China to compete with their domestic workforce, the above trends tied to the Chinese government should be cause for concern among U.S.-based CEOs.

Related: A speaker for our conference in Chicago next week, Decagon Devices' Tamsin Jolley, presented a webinar for us earlier this year on retaining technical talent, but many of the employee activities she recommended can be applied to any kind of talent.  Access a recording of this webinar here.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

What's the underlying purpose of employee engagement strategies?  Why invest in them?

They're a means to an end, and that end is a really important one: retaining top talent.  It's even more important now when you combine a recent Adecco Group survey which found that over half of U.S. workers will look for new jobs once the recession ends – and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in effect launching employees from the starting gate by waving the "recession is over" flag earlier this month.

Fortunately, there are some proven employee retention tips that innovative small businesses, including our Top Small Workplaces, are using to increase average employee tenure.  Check out this list of five key strategies:

1. Establish desired character traits for new hires.  PrintingForLess.com, for instance, looks for people who are "smart, hungry, and nice."
2. Employees tend to respond well to benefits such as health and wellness initiatives and flexible scheduling because they show the company cares about them as a whole person, and not just how much they add to the bottom line.  Lundberg Family Farms and New Belgium Brewing are role models here.
3. Tip from Becky McCray of Small Business Survival that a number of the companies we've honored follow: Get involved with your local educational system.  Show young people that a company that cares for its employees – yours – is right under their nose.
4. Bring everyone – or, in a larger firm, teams – together in a daily huddle for 15 minutes.  Merkle and 1-800-GOT-JUNK? have found great success with this practice.
5. Help your organization internally and externally (increase your competitive advantage given what will likely be a void of managers in the future, according to Management Line) by devoting significant training to new managers.  "Good first-line managers help retain employees," our Executive Director, Mary C. Clark, writes, citing the aforementioned PrintingForLess.com as a related success story.

Is your organization using one or more of the above employee development strategies?  If so, I'd love to hear how you assign value in dollars saved or earned as a result of them.  Please drop me a comment below.

Earlier this month I wrote that small businesses have an obligation, to their own knowledge base and productivity and to the U.S. economy, to turn to employee retention tips and other human capital strategies to keep their best performers from bailing to work for competing firms.

Well, the talent exodus puzzle is getting more convoluted according to HR blog Cheezhead.  It calls attention to a 2008 U.S. News & World Report article which found that "a large number of American citizens had already left for other countries and even more were planning to do so in the near future.  Many of those leaving the country are entrepreneurs...."

The drain of these workplace expats on U.S. payrolls is estimated to be $30 billion a year, the blog states.  It also explains how countries are becoming more conscious of this influx, with some making micro-investment visa and other offers to entrepreneurs to entice them to do business there.

Cheezhead ends its post with the logical question: What can recruiters and employers in America do to entice those in the workforce tempted to leave to stay?  I believe they need counter the chief appeal the blog notes for workers who are enticed to do this – the ability to climb up the career ladder faster than they could at home.

This means companies need to really hone their employee leadership development chops to provide the most opportunity for their current workforce.  Primary benefits for firms that succeed in this include lower recruitment spending, increased morale, and flexibility in covering job functions.

Here are some resources from our website that address internal leadership development to help stem the tide of workers seeking greener employment pastures in foreign countries:

• Webinar Recording: Growing Leaders from Within
• 2008 Top Small Workplaces Conference Session Coverage
• 2006 Best Bosses Conference Session Coverage
• Editorial: The Changing Face of Succession Planning
• Executive Summary: 2007 Top Small Workplaces Data Report

Photo credit: bugbog

In my writing here and in the collective voice of our content on improving employee retention through innovative team building strategies on our website, it is assumed that top-performing employees are also well-behaved employees.

But this is not always the case, as Maureen Dorgan-Clemens wrote last week on Working World Cafe, the blog of Chicago-based employer and employee services provider Perspectives Ltd.  In fact, she says,

Unfortunately, disruptive professionals are often your highest performers, like top sales people, prominent surgeons or lawyers with the best trial record.  They may be well-connected, high-profile "rainmakers" contributing significantly to your bottom line, and that can lure you into accepting their behavior.

Alas, that behavior can be costly.  Every employee that leaves in order to avoid the disruptor costs a business at least $10,000 to replace and train.  In addition, lawsuits by former employees can cost businesses tens of thousands of dollars, if not more.  The damage to your brand image if customers begin complaining publicly, you end up in the media because of a lawsuit or organizations like the Better Business Bureau begin investigating you?  More than you want to think about.

Dorgan-Clemens is absolutely right.  What's more, the audience of small and midsized businesses we speak to and serve are even less equipped financially and in resource capacity to handle the bad ends she describes than their larger peers.  If this scenario repeats itself, the long-term result is reduced competitive advantage.

Luckily, as Dorgan-Clemens points out, affordable employee assistance programs (EAPs) can help you put a framework in place to address this problem, and can even recommend "experienced behavioral coaches in your area."  She goes on to lay out how this process can work – the end result when it comes to your bottom line likely being that "it will cost a fraction of what you'd end up paying if you lost even one employee or had to settle an employee grievance or lawsuit."

To learn more about EAPs and how they can improve your workplace team building, visit these links on our website:

• Success Story: Ipswitch, Inc.
• Feature: Workplace-based Chaplains Ease HR Burden
• Feature: The Plight of Working Caregivers
• Research Summary: Deficit in Employee Engagement Costs Businesses Nearly $2 Million for Every 1,000 Employees

You can also learn more from Perspectives Ltd directly – some of their staff will be at our 2009 conference on October 1 and 2 in Chicago.