Attracting Valuable Employees is One Thing. Keeping Them Is Something Else Entirely

In many ways, your employees are and will always be the most valuable asset that your company has. Dedicated, driven employees can do everything from increasing productivity to increasing morale, all without making it seem like anything is going on at all. Even just one or two of these coveted “high value” employees can completely transform a business from the top down in the best possible way.

Many people believe that the hardest aspect of this concept involves attracting these valuable employees in the first place. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth – any business with enough money can attract someone with the type of resume that dreams are made from. For many organizations, actually keeping those employees can be a different story altogether.

Company Culture

By far, one of the single biggest reasons that valuable employees will look for work elsewhere (and eventually take it) has to do with the company culture that they’re a part of. Studies have shown a number of things that shed valuable insight into this phenomenon, like the fact that you only need to make approximately $75,000 per year in order to be “happy.” This means that if you have a valuable employee on staff who is looking to jump ship and you think that offering them $85,000 may be enough to get them to stick around, you’re probably in for a rude awakening.

As a result, the key to this becomes taking a long, hard look at your company culture and your business management philosophy to see why people may be so eager to look for employment elsewhere in the first place.

Communication in general plays a big role in this idea. Do your employees feel like they can come to you with their concerns, even if they’re about the way you’re running your business directly? Do they feel like they can offer up criticism without fear of retribution? Or do they feel like if they question your authority (or the authority of their direct supervisor) that they will face some type of penalty as a result? If the former describes your working environment much more accurately than the latter, you may be looking at the number one reason why you’re having a hard time keeping valuable employees.

Valuable Employees Want a Valuable Leader

Another one of the biggest reasons why high value employees may want to work elsewhere has to do with a person’s leadership style, or more appropriately their lack thereof. Strong employees have strong ideas and they want to know that the person who is in charge of their daily activities is actually worth following into battle. If you’re running a business that seems aimless in that you don’t have a clearly defined mission on an operational level and you don’t have a strong set of values that you’ve worked hard to communicate and practice yourself, your business can start to feel aimless.

Employees can start to wonder why they’re wasting their time in a business that isn’t going anywhere because it doesn’t know where it wants to go in the first place. Having a strong direction and clearly communicating those goals is another key to keeping valuable employees for as long as possible.

At the end of the day, the number one thing to remember is that if you want to keep valuable employees, you have to create the type of environment where valuable employees will want to work. Money can only carry you so far, and most passionate people didn’t get into their chosen industry for money in the first place. If you’re having a hard time keeping people in place, looking inward is the first thing you should do on the road to recovery.

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