Retaining Talented Employees

There's a new staffing technique prevalent in Silicon Valley today, and it's coming your way as well. It's called mirror hiring. You locate a potential employee (by hook, tranquilizer gun, or kidnapping) then hold a mirror to the candidate's lips. If you find evidence of breath, you hire them.

But however you get them, the real challenge in this job market is keeping talented employees on board. Job turnaround now averages less than two years in West Coast high tech industries. Recruiters and associates at every professional meeting constantly woo MBA's, programmers, marketers, project managers, even trainers and HR managers. Their emails are filled with offers.

In an environment of "Jobs available anywhere!" the time-honored retention techniques of quarterly bonuses, social perks, even stock options are simply inadequate to the task of tying a good worker to a specific company. Good executives need to learn that hearts and minds can be won, but never simply purchased.

The executive edge in holding onto top talent must go beyond compensation, special dinners and public pats-on-the-back. Today's top managers must be able to draw the distinction between gratuity and appreciation. And they must be facile in both.

Gratuity is thanking and rewarding an individual for results. Most executives and managers understand the rules here very well. If you don't, learn them. They are simple: Money must match the result. Payment and Thank-You's should be face-to-face or, at least, a phone call coming from a senior executive.

Rewards, such as a weekend getaway or night-on-the-town, must fit the desires and value structure of the employee, not the manager. No reward should ever create additional effort for the worker. For example, if you buy Sarah a new CD stereo system for her BMW, schedule and pay for the installation as well.

But understand that bonus, perks and public acknowledgment for jobs well done are gratuity, not appreciation. In our results-oriented commerce, most executives do not understand appreciation, let alone its power to build loyalty.

Appreciation is not a thank you. Think of it more in the context of art appreciation. In its classical meaning, appreciation was defined as the expressed sensitivity to another's suffering. In other words, appreciation is telling someone that you know specifically what it took for them to produce a result or simply continue to live in the demanding conditions the world placed them in.

How does appreciation support employee retention? People at work need to be compensated for their results. But more than that, they want their work, their efforts to be known. They want to know that their commitment, their time and their energy makes a difference to the company and executives they work for.

Here's how to apply appreciation in two circumstances. Any time you are about to reward top performance, go beyond compensating the results. Stop and consider, in detail, the day in, day out tasks and sacrifices your employee made to achieve the result. Thank them specifically for all the phone calls (and voice mail messages) they had to put up with. Thank them for all the times they rearranged their schedules, the canceled personal and family plans.

Thank them for tolerating the delays, the change requests, and the incomplete communications. Thank them for weathering the storm and stress of producing anything in this "shoot first, aim later" business environment we've all created. Apologize for the added burdens and hurdles that changing technologies and rapid expansion constantly threw in their path. The more accurate and detailed your appreciation, the better. Be relentless. And never generalize your appreciation.

Do not let your prized employee deflect your acknowledgment of what they went through to accomplish what they did for you and your company. Most people have difficulty giving and receiving appreciation. Probably because the last person one ever appreciates is themselves.

Also, do not wait until a winning employee produces the end result to appreciate their efforts. Make it a habit to appreciate efforts along the way. In many cases, the more seemingly insignificant events, once appreciated, prove to carry the most impact.

The other circumstances is during any debrief or performance review. Use your "appreciative scrutiny". Ask the staff member specifically what they had to do to produce the results. Then ask them how the company, its culture and business practices got in their way. What would they change next time in how the company supported them. And thank them for their candor. Let them know what you will do to try to make their work easier and more productive. Or apologize for the fact that it is not going to get any better. Thank them for staying in it with you.

If you are finding all this appreciating a little hard to swallow. If the voice in your head is arguing: "Well that's what we pay them to do. We compensate people very damn well to put up with all this!" Then I suggest you brush up on operational tactics to manage an annual total staff turnover. In my thirty years in sales, service and organizational development, I have never seen a more critical need for appreciation in the workplace. Nor has the lack of appreciation ever been so directly, dollars and cents, costly.

By the way, you might want to practice a little of this appreciation thing with your spouse and children. Do you have any idea what it takes, minute by minute, to be a good student and a good kid in today's school environment? Last, stop occasionally and appreciate yourself.

It just might be your executive edge.

P.S. Thank you for the work you do. The hours in meetings. The multitude of vacant voice mails, incoherent faxes and unclear emails you suffer. The time lost in agenda-less meetings, late appointments, standstill traffic, and flight delays. I am sorry we find ourselves in such a fast spinning morass of new technologies, land-grabbing digital spaces and new economies. I am sorry it all falls on your shoulders, second by unrelenting second, to hold your business intact and keep it moving at these blurring speeds. Thank you for the magnificent effort you put forth daily.