The best way to reduce employee turnover and retain your stellar employees is to constantly re-recruit them. This doesn’t mean just doing things to maintain the status quo, but actively working to develop and promote from within.

The era of life-time employees is long over. And while we would all like to think that our employees will never want to leave, the reality is that they do. But there are ways to reduce employee turnover by focusing on your current employees the same way you focus on recruiting new hires.
I like to use a little acronym called RETAIN.

* Recognize
* Encourage
* Train
* Ask
* Inform
* Nurture

First and foremost, nothing goes further than a bit of recognition. So recognize employees for a job well done. Second, encourage and support them to think and act without fear of constant reprisal. Third, train them by providing the lessons and tools they need to get the job done the right way. But also offer the opportunity to gain new skills through in-house or off-site training.

Fourth, ask them what is important to them, what role they would like to play on the team, in the department and in the organization. And when your employees ask you questions, follow the fifth step: inform. Keep them informed on how they are doing as well as what is going on in the company. Finally, nurture them by getting to know them and by discovering their skills and abilities so you can get the most out of them.

The second part of reducing employee turnover is to actually recruit from within. This literally means to identify and promote stellar employees into new opportunities within the organization, whether you’re back filling or creating a whole new position, department, or division. This is often known as succession planning (something that will be discussed in future postings).

If organizations would go after current employees with the same enthusiasm they display when seeking new recruits, employee turnover would probably be cut drastically. So next time you’re thinking about how to reduce employee turnover, consider how you can RETAIN your current employees.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 8:56 am and is filed under Employee Retention, Training, Employee Turnover, Succession Planning. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.