How to retain your best people for the long haul
One of the hardest things as a leader is watching great team members leave. Even when the culture is supportive, growth is encouraged, and achievements are celebrated, people still go – usually for roles that offer the promotions or progression your organisation just can’t provide.
If you’re leading a team in a hierarchical structure and know you can’t offer everyone the next step up, it’s easy to feel stuck (especially when recruiting is expensive). And while exit interviews often point to external opportunities being the real pull factor, here’s what I’d recommend:
Focus on extending tenure
Rather than thinking about how to keep people around forever, think about how you can extend their tenure with you by a year or 18 months, as all those additional months of service will add up to a lower recruitment bill overall. So can you offer inexpensive long-term training programmes they’ll want to stay around to complete, or projects that widen their skillset and give them exposure that they wouldn’t normally get?
Build a strong alumni network
When people do go, stay in touch and create a strong alumni network for your department. This will mean that, if you are recruiting in future at a higher level, you may have your pick of good people who are happy to come back and save a lot of money on recruitment fees in putting the job out to market.
Compare the stats
I’d also benchmark how long people stay with you against industry figures (if you can find them – or ask peers in other firms for their stats). This will help you to see if there’s a problem with people leaving you before they should (and then you can dig deeper into why) or whether you’re actually doing better than average. I sense from what you’ve said above regarding what you’re already offering them that you are probably doing better.
3 resources to help with staff leaving
12 tried and tested methods for retaining employees: use this article to check that you are taking action across the board
How to design a corporate alumni programme: if you want to stay in touch with ex-employees, this is a great way to do so
Methods to find out why people are really leaving: great research approaches to find out what’s going on
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