Focus on your top employees
The challenges throughout the last year focused on how to maintain the revenue, trim the budget and retain as many employees as possible. Almost every business of every size lost something and, more important, somebody — as evidenced by that aforementioned unemployment rate, which has increased during almost every month since April 2008.
You might still need to trim your budget, but you will also need to focus on identifying and retaining your high-performance and high-potential employees. So often, those employees might think the grass is greener on the other side of the proverbial fence. But what about when the grass is brown? What about when there is no grass? Heck, forget the grass, what about when there is no fence? They remain where they are for as long as necessary, as they are doing now because there are so few available positions in the marketplace.
Then they leave.
That is, at least, the consensus among dozens of human resources and human capital experts.
“Employers are doing whatever they need to do,” St. John says. “But they need to take care, because employees have long memories, and the manner in which employers get through these difficult times will not be lost on their employees. There’s not a lot of job-hopping going on these days, but when things get better, which they ultimately will, employers will have had to have done a good job of communicating openly and treating their employees as well as they could have.”
The process of retaining your employees has already started, with your top workers likely influenced by how you handled the fallout from the shock of the recession. If you handled layoffs with dignity, communicating why decisions were made and what they meant for the future, that helped. So did any revenue investment in those top workers, from compensation and bonuses to training programs and seminars. And if you talked with those top workers and relayed to them where they fit in the vision for your business, that would have been about the best thing you could have done.
“Employees talk, so when it gets around to human-resources-type programs, over coffee or at a holiday party or wherever, people talk about what their organizations are doing, whether or not health care is provided, how much you have to pay for health care,” St. John says. “If an employee has a negative perception of those things and becomes aware that there are those perceptions, they may not be able to act on it immediately, but they will keep that in mind and look for other opportunities.”