How To Keep Your Employees From Quitting
Once you find and hire the right individual, how do you keep them from quitting? Keep in mind that some employees quit and leave, while others quit and stay. If you have the right culture, the likelihood is that your employees will do neither. The most successful business owner I have had the privilege of representing for more than 20 years uses the phrase “outside-in.” It describes a culture that's customer driven, where you find out what your customers want and you give it to them. This is to be contrasted with an “ inside-out” mentality where you decide what your customers want. My favorite example of an outside-in approach is when Mazda Motor Corporation was designing the Miata. Instead of allowing their engineers to design and build a car that their marketing department would then have to convince the public to buy, they went out and researched what their customers wanted. They even went so far as to have potential buyers listen to audio tapes of different car engines and choose which sound they liked the best. The researchers then took the most popular sound to their engineers and instructed them to make the Miata engine sound like that.
You want a culture that's open and that fully shares information with your employees. Sharing information produces more knowledge, and an employee who has more knowledge has more confidence. When an employee has more confidence, they usually make better decisions, are more innovative, more productive, and happier, and most importantly, they don’t quit.
A cultural driven organization is far more successful than one driven by tangible things and by structure. When you have the right philosophy, you create a culture and a structure based on what’s important to your employees. We all understand that salary is important. But I’ve discovered over the years that time off is of greater importance to my employees than money. Because of this, each of my employees receives generous vacation time, i.e, 3 to 5 weeks depending on their tenure. After an employee has been with my office for 5 years, and on each subsequent 5-year anniversary, they receive an entire month off with pay. And that’s in addition to their regular vacation time. The same thing applies to how you set up the physical layout of your office. In my office, each of my employees (except for my receptionist) has their own office with windows. Would having their own offices be of value to your employees? If you remember the final scene in the movie “Working Girl,” Melanie Griffith’s character knew she had finally made it when she got her own office. It’s up to you to create a structure that allows for what’s important to your employees.
In many companies, the employees have the perception that the owners and managers put themselves on a pedestal over their employees and create a class environment. If you adopt a culture where every employee is considered equally important, if you create a culture where the receptionist is just as important, albeit differently important, as the CEO of your company, then your employees will see value in what they do. And if your employees see value in what they do and are treated accordingly, then you’re going to retain them.
