Employee Retention: It’s All About the Manager
Posted March 5th, 2012
Human resource professionals who work to reduce employee turnover know that an employee’s manager is a key piece of the retention puzzle. Although keeping employees at a company ultimately involves more than just one person or incentive, managers have a big effect on whether workers stay or go.
It has been said that employees quit their bosses, not their jobs, and that quote has a lot of truth to it. Despite the rough economy, many workers are still leaving their jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are no statistics on exactly why these people left their jobs, but Richard Finnegan of the Retention Institute suspects that bad managers had more than a little to do with it. The relationship that a manager creates with his workers is the prime factor in whether a worker will leave or stay, Finnegan says. Moreover, the people leaving were probably some of the best workers in the companies they left, Finnegan says. A recent survey has shown that 25 percent of top workers were looking for work last year, compared to just 15 percent in 2005.
Finnegan says that when companies have problems with retention, they usually go to their human resources department to develop some new policy or incentive to help tackle the problem. But these kinds of things are of little help when, instead, the companies should be getting their managers involved in the process.
To keep employees, there are no magic bullets, no simple solutions, according to human resource professionals. It takes an effort by many different people, and changing the culture of the organization. For example, at one retirement community, there was a problem retaining nursing staff. So, the human resources director, Jane Holda, conducted interviews to find out what factors were contributing to the turnover.
Then, the organization began a training program that focused on building trust among its managers and directors. The managers were held accountable for building trust with their workers, and this activity was incorporated into their performance review, Holda says. In addition, managers were asked to evaluate their own ethics and integrity, while workers were asked about managers’ approachability, how interested they were in employees’ problems, and whether they followed up on inquiries.
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