Employee Retention 2000 Follow Up

Thank you ERE Members for the excellent feedback and insight you provided me on Employee Retention. We can all learn from each other and immediately after writing Employee Retention 2000 (October 28th) you sent me some terrific feedback on reasons you have found that employees leave as well as some successful methods you have used to combat employee turnover. Here are some of the fun things you have used as well as I have seen that help to create an enjoyable, low stress and fun work environment. It’s The Little Things… “We buy bagels for everyone on the first day of their employment and put them on the new hires desk so everyone has to introduce themselves as they grab a bagel…this allows the employee to get to know everyone in the office.” “We take a new employee to Costco on their first day so that they can pick out their own executive chair…this shows that their comfort is important to us.” “We offer retention bonuses based on their salary and reward them for the longevity with our firm.” “We put a lot of time and effort into our employee orientation as well as train our managers to ‘do something special for the new hire’ on their first day…rewarding our managers for their creativity.” “We have ongoing contests that allows the employees to earn ‘auction dollars’ so that once every 3 months we have an auction of fun, small prizes that all employees can bid for.” “Since all of our employees needs are different we have our managers sit down with each employee and let the employee set their goals as well as the reward they would like to receive for meeting that goal i.e. Dinner for two at the companies expense or a free 1/2 day off…” “Company wide meetings held more than once a year so that employees can feel involved in the overall success of the organization.” “Company sponsored ‘brown bag lunch’ meetings that features a variety of speakers and employees.” “We offered a PTO plan that gave the employees almost 30 days off during the year and boy, did my recruiting get a lot easier! I found that people value their time more than money these days!” “We have a masseuse come in every so often to give our employees neck and shoulder massages while they work.” “We give magazine subscriptions or Amazon.com gift certificates to our valued employees.” A recent article in the October 19, 1999 Inc. Magazine features other great ideas companies have used to retain their employees. Overall, there is much we can do, we just need to take the lead and develop the processes while training our managers on implementing these little yet vital methods on keeping our employees satisfied in our workplaces.