Your people are ready to leave. How do you keep them? | Maryland Association of CPAs (MACPA)

03/21/2012 • by Bill Sheridan

Your people are ready to leave. How do you keep them?

A few notes about the economy, courtesy of some thought leaders out there.

First of all, it's getting better. The recovery isn't knocking anyone's socks off yet. It's slow, boring, and a lot of people are still out of work. But it's real, reports The Economist.

“Economic recovery doesn’t have to wait for all of America’s imbalances to be corrected. It only needs the process to advance far enough for the normal cyclical forces of employment, income and spending to take hold,” the publication notes. “And though their grip may be tenuous, and a shock might yet dislodge it, it now seems that, at last, they have.”

A sure sign of economic re-stability is the willingness of American workers to start job-hopping again, and according to a recent Deloitte study, that's a huge concern at many businesses.

“These worries are well founded,” reports Fast Company. “Only about one-third of employees at larger companies expect to stay with their employers when the recession ends. Of course, employees with mission-critical leadership skills don't even need to wait for the economic tide to turn, and many are not.”

ERE.net claims that the “war for talent” is already under way in places like Silicon Valley, and it's spreading rapidly.

“By the time you realize that you’re actually involved in a war for talent, it may be too late,” Dr. John Sullivan writes. “You simply won’t have time in the midst of the battle to renew your strategy, your staff, and your talent management approaches. Things that you have taken for granted over recent years like a high applicant flow, complacent candidates, and low turnover may completely turn around in a few months. Workers who have recently demanded security will shift their expectations to include challenge, innovation, development opportunities, and an opportunity for wealth through stock options. And unless you have good metrics, you won’t realize until months afterward that the changes have occurred.”

So the obvious question is: How do you get your best people to stay?

The answer, says Forbes contributor Erika Andersen, is to be a well-managed organization with clear goals and a track record of providing employees with inspiring work. Andersen took fellow Forbes writer Eric Jackson's 10 reasons why top talent leaves and boiled them down to one:

Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring.

“It really is that simple,” Andersen writes. “Not easy, mind you, but remarkably simple.”

Bottom line: Your best employees are ready to start looking again. If you want to keep them, manage them well, give them clear goals, and inspire them.

That's a leader's job, after all — to make their teams feel stronger and more capable.

How are you doing that?

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