Why Retaining Employees Matters

These summarize has been gathered from Retaining Employees by Harvard Business Press. 

If you ask from any of CEOs or firm leaders that: “what is one of the most important things you can do for your company?” Most likely you can hear an answer like this as one of the major items:

I would like to keep valued employees on board.

Firm’s ability to retain talented employees is crucial because of these reasons in our time:

• Companies rely on intellectual capital
• More people are leaving firms
• Replacing employees are very costly

Multigenerational Preface 

According to our time there are few relevant workforce generations which are:

1. The bloomer generation (born between 1946 and 1964)
2. Generation X (born between 1965 and 1979)
3. Generation Y (born between 1980 and 1995)

According to various resources and researches there are different assumptions on aforementioned generations. Generally speaking (Retaining Employees, HBR):

• Boomers tend to believe: I want to help to change the world but also need to compete to win
• Generation X tends to believe: I can’t depend on institutions. I need to keep my options open.
• Generation Y tends to believe: I need to live life now and work toward long-term shared goals

I do recommend make a demographic study in your firm and come with such result:

Then easily you can consider what below strategies are more relevant for you and you can tune the rules and regulations based on statistics.

Boomers

Boomers bring these features for your firm:

• broad knowledge and rich business know-how
• Abilities like reliability, patience, or fairness.

Also they might bring:

• Fiercely competitive
• Having some sights on second career or flexible job opportunity

If you like to retain the boomers these are the strategies you might need:

• Ask boomers what they need.
• Give them flexibility.
• Make work interesting and meaningful
• Customize the compensation system based on their needs

Generation X

Gen Xers are: independent, loyal to their friends, balanced and adaptable to change. However they might bring some challenges such as:

• For them career is about individual not the company
• Many of them might feel underappreciated and frustrated at work.

How to retain Gen Xers:

• Earn their loyalty by demonstrating commitment
• Give Gen Xers career options
• Re-recruit them regularly
• Work/life balance is crucial for Gen Xers.
• Allow them to resign and leave gracefully

Generation Y

Gen Y or so called Millennials bring features such as: state-of-the-art technical knowledge, upbeat, socially conscious, goal-oriented and self-confident. But they pose some difficulties such as:

• Ys have high expectations from their employers.
• Ys sees job as a key part of life
• Ys are not willing to log hours at office, they prefer to do get the job done
• Ys prefer horizontal organizations not hierarchical.
• Ys are used to have open access to information

To retain Gen Ys:

• Customize the work for them and provide career growth
• Provide feedback and expect feedback from them too.
• Think task not time. Do not track their working hours at office.
• Emphasize on the meaning of the tasks
• Lead through learning