Engaging and Retaining Employees in Challenging Times

Durkin asked why would a company care about retaining employee in this current economic crisis? Durkin talked about the importance of retaining employees even in turbulent market conditions, who are critical to your company’s current and future performance are sought after.

Durkin’s four practices all organizations should cultivate and grow for employee engagement and retention:

• Professional Development
• Management Support
• Organizational Commitment to a larger social purpose
• Performance Management

For professional development is it important for managers and supervisors to understand the skills needed in various roles but what is equally important is “stretch assignments” taking employees out of their comfort level and asking them to take on additional risks and responsibilities. For example, Dianne Durkin mentioned one of her associates helped with inside business development activities, when approached to go out on joint sales appointments she was fearful. Eventually she enjoyed going out and meeting people on sales appointments and was able to make a success transition to an outside sales person.

We all have to do more with fewer resources, this is never more prevalent today and management support which is to motivate, guide and assess individual employees and teams. Coaching employees with a continuous feedback loop, conducting performance reviews with HR’s annual planning schedule. Durkin mentioned having a “goodie bag” of rewarding employees with movie tickets or inexpensive gift cards to either Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts, of course knowing your employees’ coffee preference helps here! It is the small tokens of appreciation that really count with employees and helps reinforce valuable employees.

With today's diverse workforce come generational challenges of how to you as a manager or supervisor continue to motivate, retain and challenge employees for organizational commitment. For example, Generation Xers, those born between 1965 thru 1977 want to know “I am I making a difference” in terms of the larger social purpose such as the project that they are working on. Communicating and being kept abreast on departmental and company wide news is the number one rank priority according to a Gallop Study and salary ranks fourth. We are seeing more employee work-life balance considerations as many people want compensatory time instead of overtime with the various life events we are faced with such as caring for an elderly parent. In short, understanding how each generation views the world is vital for engaged employees.

The last practice and the most important one is Performance Management. This is the nucleus in which allows the other three practices to work in tandem. Performance Management effectively assesses recognizes and rewards engaged employees with accountability throughout the organization. Every employee should understand how their efforts contribute to the overall mission and vision of their company.

I’ll leave you two pieces of advice with what Dianne Durkin instilled during her presentation; the two most important words are Thank you and happen to be the most under utilized two words in the English language. Remember to say thank you to your employees. The second piece of advice is to ask questions; this is your secret to engaging and retaining employees that will result in less turnover and higher productivity of your most valuable employees.