Four Tips for Retaining Your Best People

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With the economy on a slow, but steady upswing, and employment opportunities more abundant, it’s safe to say that at least a third of your staff is looking for their next job right now. The best ones – those you can least afford to lose – will have the earliest success. 

Properties with competent, caring leaders will see less attrition and have more attraction. Those on the other end of the scale will have managers who go home each night thinking of the metaphor involving rats and sinking ships.

Here are four ways I’ve seen successful organizations win the hearts and minds of their top talent, without breaking the bank: 

1. Start "re-recruiting" your current employees. That’s right, re-recruiting. When you’re in the market for new hires, you spend time and other resources wooing the best people you can find. What are you doing now, to convince those already onboard, that working for you was, and still is, their best career decision?  

Start with your three best people. Maybe one from leasing, one from maintenance, and one from another department. Do you know who they are? Have you told them they mean a lot to you? Do you know what makes them stay with you? If not, find out, and then feed it. 

2. On the premise that people usually "quit their manager," rather than their job or the company, make effective leadership skills an absolute requirement for anyone in a management or supervisory position. It’s not enough to be good at the technical part of your management job; you’ve got to be a leader whom people want to follow. Evaluate, reward, and coach managers and supervisors, in part, on their success in people skills, not just their technical abilities. 

3. As the business climate improves, there’s a tendency to re-open the cookie jar in an effort to restore staff morale. Be careful. The one thing you don’t want to do is pile on fixed costs alongside an economy that seems destined to take one step back for every two steps forward. A much better idea is to implement targeted, meaningful recognition measures that are firmly linked to performance. As a management team, determine, and document a few top performance measures for each department, and design attractive rewards for achieving goals in those areas. Not sure what kinds of reward would be attractive to your staff? Ask them. 

4. Do your own "Undercover Boss" activity, minus the "undercover" part. Take a week and work alongside staff in various departments on your property. This will be more valuable education than most of us have had since college. You'll discover firsthand what (and who) is working in your organization, and what’s not. When we've prescribed this activity for clients, many of them, after taking the medicine, reported that one of the most valuable elements of the exercise was learning what sort of policies, procedures, and systems are driving residents away, driving employees crazy, and keeping them from doing their very best work. 

Can you afford to have a third of your staff with their attention tuned to their next job, rather than on your residents and the success of your business? If you can’t, take these proactive measures to ensure your best people will want to be nowhere but with you.

Richard Hadden, CSP, is one of our Education Conference & Trade Show speakers. Come hear him speak on "Contended Cows Give Better Milk: Your People... Your Profit" on Thursday, Oct. 17, from 3:15-4:45 p.m.