No matter how tenured or loyal your current team, it’s never a good idea to believe they’ll be there forever!

Yes, the key members of your team, like all employees, are vulnerable to turnover – no matter how important they are to your company, how much you rely on them to produce results, how loyal you believe they are to you, their team, the company.

And when a valued team member quits, its not always pretty. It often happens unexpectedly, at a time when you have the least bandwidth to deal with change. And yes, losing a member of you admin team always means change!

And shame on any of us who didn’t take the time to see it coming. The reasons why an employee quits sound very much alike…

“I wasn’t really looking to change jobs, but an opportunity came up that I just couldn’t pass up.” 

And these “new opportunities” should sound familiar.  Your favorite person on earth has just told you something you should have known.  I just wanted to….…

• Make more money.
• Get better healthcare benefits for my husband’s new illness  
• Work closer to home (or in today’s market – to work more days from home)”
• Find better work/life balance – less stress, fewer hours of work
• Try something new (or more meaningful)
• Get away from ________ who has been pissing me off for some time 

Yep, we’ve heard it all. It might be of interest, and psychologically soothing, to know that turnover and all the disruption is an everyday occurrence at enterprise level organizations but it happenes in smaller companies just as often – most times with much more surprise. According to some recently generated research sponsored by customer.ai, the Northwest “bigs” deal with a level of churn that would bring most of us to our knees.

Check out this data on the average length of time an employee is in the workforce for the following companies…

• Facebook 2.02 years
• Google 1.9 years
• Apple 1.85 years
• Amazon 1.84 years
• Microsoft 1.81 years

Looks to me that one of the ways smaller organizations can compete for talent is to find new ways to retain their employees for more than 2 years – not a high hurdle.

We’ve put together some ideas to help you retain the key members of your team…

Some are suggestions we’ve used on our own team, plus seen our clients use in their work environments – in most cases very successfully.  There is no ONE magic bullet that fixes everything, but instead a whole bunch of little things that we have found to contribute to teammember retention. Certainly those of us who fall into the small to medium sized group (SMEs) can do these things better than our Northwest bigs. Check out these ideas…..

Adjust your expectations for longevity. You’re not living in the 80’s. 

Gone are the days when an employee earns their stripes only after being in their job for a “really long time.” Based on the data we see, and the resumes we review, employers who can keep a good member of their team happy, productive and contributing for 3 or more years should consider themselves successful. That said, if you aren’t retaining your new hires for more than a year it might be time to re think your hiring process. The data clearly suggests that to avoid surprises, you need to stay close, checking in with an employee on what’s going on with them, every six months, or even more.

Remember what was important to your employee when they were hired!

We believe that any retention strategy worth its salt, starts during the hiring process. As part of the hiring equation, a hiring manager needs to learn about why the employee works, what they want to achieve through their work. The employee needs to learn about the company and its mission. Where is it going? How they will fit in?

If you’re walking thru all the steps in a results based hiring process you’ll know at the point of hire what’s important to your new employee and why they chose to work for you.   Veer too far away from their beliefs about who you are really, and the chances of an unexpected  turnover increase. And if you’ve found one of those high performing folks who simply wants to do a job and do it well with a stable source of income, your risk of an unexpected turnover goes down if you continue to provide them with steady work. But if you’ve hired someone looking for an opportunity to grow, you’d better make sure you give them those opportunities from time to time or they’ll likely find a reason to check out.

Stay connected to the “person” who is your employee.  

People’s lives change, and so do their needs for what they want from the “work” side of their lives. Stay close to your employee’s personal lives, paying attention to any issue that might change their job needs. When life gets a bit too dicey, be ready to offer short term part-time arrangements. When life needs an energy boost, a trip to attend a conference in New Orleans might do the trick.  A sudden health issue can change an employee’s need for expanded healthcare benefits or a pay increase so they can cover new out of pocket costs. The bottom-line you need to know who you are working with, not just what they do!

Build in opportunities to develop new skills, new work experiences.  

Your employee isn’t just an employee so take them out of that box.  Many valuable employees are in roles where the work is more routine or boring than challenging and creative.  Many employees take these jobs because they involve work they can do – they were organized, they knew how to use all the Microsoft software, they could solve problems, they were pleasant to be around.

But landing a job that someone can do, doesn’t mean that’s where a talented employee wants to end up. Finding opportunities for members of your team to flex their career focused muscles, to learn new skills, to practice taking the lead on important on short or long term projects or initiatives are pieces of work you can give to every member of your team, that will keep them active and engaged.

It all starts with getting serious about each employee’s potential – what unique contributions can they make to your company’s success that may or may not be part of their current job description. Better yet, organize work so that it includes paths of opportunity for each employee . Even your entry level receptionist, for example, should know how they can advance into other roles – a team assistant, a project coordinator or even a project lead. If you’ve got a clear career path for each member of your team, spell it out clearly. Pay attention to how you hire at the entry level – recognizing the value of employees you can count on to advance so you are always building from the bottom up. (These kind of “advancement” stories, by the way, are great recruiting tools.)

Play with job titles that actually reflect the employee’s real contribution.

And when one of your admin employees is doing work that goes well beyond the admin title, adjust their job title to reflect their contribution. Admin I, II and III are job titles that only make sense in an enterprise level organization where pay plans often dictate job titles. Not the case in a small to medium sized company where you have lots of room to develop the job titles that employees want – titles that reflect the value they have to the organization.

To land on the right job title, ask yourself in what areas each of your employee’s is making a difference and create a job title that matches their contribution. How about Social Outreach Manager for someone who is executing your social media campaigns? How about Director of Business Execution for someone who is working in your back office making sure all your operational teams are working together?

Keep up with what’s going on with pay in your market.

Market competitive pay rates can shift quickly if you’re not looking at the market regularly and adjusting pay levels accordingly.  This is oftentimes tough to do with admin jobs where the actual duties and levels of responsibilities attached to a role can vary significantly from job to job, company to company.

If you have a question about what you should be paying for someone who does ________________________, give us a call and we’ll try to benchmark that work against what other companies in this market are paying for the same or similar type work.  Market competitive reviews of your pay plans for all job categories are critically important and should be done annually.

Ask Questions.

Ask the right questions and most employees will tell you what you need to know about where they are with respect to their job. Stay interviews have become increasingly popular over the last several years but they need to be for real – authentic discussions of “how are you feeling about your job right now” “Is there something a competitive employer might offer that would convince you to make a change?”. Know where you stand so you don’t have surprises.

Never take an employee for granted.

Just because a member of your team was willing to work some extra hours during a product launch, doesn’t mean they want to keep working at that level on the go forward.  Never take advantage of your favorite employee’s work ethic – any employee’s work ethic. Keep in mind there are members of your team that don’t get to set the company’s agenda but are expected to respond to it. This means that most of your employee’s work life balance is always in some sort of ebb and flow and not always at their own direction. You can’t expect to keep your team perpetually operating on the flow side of the ebb and flow and get their best performance.

And don’t forget to show your appreciation for everything an employee does –  even if deep down you believe its stuff that’s just a part of their job description. Showing appreciation, making sure the employee sees the link between their hard work and the results the organization enjoys, is worth its weight in gold.

Bring in a temp from time to time for some mental health relief for your admin team!

You know that pile of paperwork over in the corner that your admin team never quite gets time to process?   That project you asked your team to do “when they had time.” Well, those stacks of paper, those projects that stay on the to do list forever, can be a really big source of stress for the conscientious people, particularly members of your admin team. They hate not checking things off their to do list.  They hate boxes of paper sitting in the corner.

Bringing in a temp every once in a while to do clean up projects, answer phones when things get super busy, or just cover work that tends to stack up on when someone is on leave or vacation, is a nice mental health thing to do for your admin team. Trust me, they will appreciate that you noticed!

FINAL THOUGHTS – How Can PACE Help?

First of all we can help by making sure your hiring process helps you identify the kind of employee who is the “right fit” for your team. That “right fit” is key to long term retention of any employee.  All employee’s like to have some kind of affinity or personal connection with the people they work with. That doesn’t mean they hang out for a beer after work, but it does mean that there needs to be a good match between an employee’s preferred work environment and team culture and what the employee will actually experience at work.

Our team can help you piece together the key factors impacting the type of candidate who will be the “right fit” for your team, plus help you source and then assess potential candidates to meet those requirements.

And we don’t see any two work environments the same, particularly thru the eyes of the people who work in these environments. Personal initiative and creativity, for example, are qualities required for many jobs and work teams, but for others, more focused on compliance and rule following, not so much. Communication style always makes a difference – some employees being really good at keeping others in the loop, others not so much. Which communication style works best for your team? Some employees are most effective when they can work alone with minimal interruptions while others thrive on ongoing interactions to keep them alert and productive.  Some people love jobs with lots of details and prefer work environments with enough space to do high quality, no mistakes level of work. Others prefer a faster moving environment, where mistakes happen and just need quick corrections.

Another way PACE can help is to do exit interviews with employees who have decided to leave their job. Information from exiting employees can be invaluable in profiling the right replacement candidate – what type of candidate profile is likely to be the right hire.  We are big fans of exit interviews, particularly for smaller employers who can’t afford to repeat past hiring mistakes.