{"id":10545,"date":"2015-04-27T02:05:22","date_gmt":"2015-04-27T09:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/getlighthouse.com\/blog\/?p=10545"},"modified":"2024-07-16T14:51:50","modified_gmt":"2024-07-16T14:51:50","slug":"employee-retention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/getlighthouse.com\/blog\/employee-retention\/","title":{"rendered":"Employee Retention: The Keys to Long, Happy Working Relationships"},"content":{"rendered":"

As soon as you start growing your team, a key focus of any leader must be retention; replacing an employee is expensive both financially (as much as $65,000<\/a>) as well as due to lost productivity for your team. With retention being such a crucial issue as the economy recovers and job hopping becomes easier, we wanted to be sure to cover this on the Lighthouse leadership blog.<\/p>\n

Our friend, Eric Jorgenson<\/a>, has made his latest edition of Evergreen<\/a> all about the difficult challenge of retaining your team and I'm excited to share it today. (You can sign up to get all of Evergreen's in depth posts here<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Evergreens<\/strong><\/em> are designed to feel like short books; let yourself meander and spend ~3 hours on this topic this week<\/em><\/strong>. Save some of these links for deep diving later and leave this week smarter than you started!<\/em><\/p>\n

Employee Retention: The Keys to Long, Happy Working Relationships<\/h1>\n

Employee retention is on every leader's mind. Building or managing a successful company means crafting and keeping a great team. After doing the hard work to recruit<\/a> and hire<\/a> the best employees, it's important to make sure they stick around to do great work with you for a long time; replacing employees gets expensive fast!<\/p>\n

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Over time, employees tend to get better at their jobs, and grow with the company; their value grows the longer they're with you. They also save you money on costs of hiring and new staff training, and your company and culture become more stable with less turnover.<\/p>\n

One fundamental thing to realize about employee retention is that the effort starts on day 1. Recruiting<\/a>, Hiring<\/a>, and Onboarding<\/a> all factor into Employee Retention efforts. As we'll see in this deep dive on the subject \u2014\u200abeing proactive is far more effective than being reactive when it comes to employees wanting to quit.<\/p>\n

Stop Saying \u2018Employee Retention'<\/h2>\n

During exploring this topic, it became clear how poorly-chosen this phrase is. What's the definition of retention?<\/p>\n

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Noun. \"The continued possession, use, or control of something.\"<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Companies have no such relationship with their employees, nor should they aspire to it. Working for a company is a mutual agreement that benefits both sides.<\/p>\n

Let's think about this problem in terms of \u2018Employee Engagement<\/em>'\u2014 it's not perfect but it's better than \u2018retention'.<\/p>\n

Semantics here are important, and they will define the mindset and the way challenges are approached. Retaining someone implies that they want to leave, and intervention will stop them, or keep them despite their wishes to leave. This is clearly not an effective way to tackle this problem.<\/p>\n

Let's look at this challenge in a more fundamental way, and see if we can think about this more clearly. What we'll cover today:<\/p>\n