Manager's Corner - Retain Your Employees: Get To Know Them

Employee retention is a hot topic. Every employer knows it's terribly expensive, time consuming, and disruptive to operations to repeatedly recruit, hire, train, and then lose employees. There are many reasons employees leave their jobs. However, time and again, employees leave because of position mismatches, a lack of support for skills development, or a lack of advancement opportunities.

Luckily, these causes can be easily minimized by simply taking 15 to 30 minutes per employee to get to know him or her better. The following list of questions can be used as a tool to get to know your employees. More importantly, it will help you determine what their conce
s, interests, and ambitions are so you know what may help them to stay with your organization or what may cause them to leave.

Get To Know Your Employees:
1. Do you know how your job is important to this company?
2. What skills do you use on this job?
3. What other skills and talents do you have that you don't use on this job?
4. What are some things you have done with other jobs that you enjoyed that you don't do here?
5. Which elements of your job here do you find challenging? Why?
6. Which elements of your job are rewarding? Why?
7. Which elements of your job are frustrating? Why?
8. Are you comfortable with the level and quality of training you receive for your current or future jobs? Why or why not?
9. If you could, how would you change your current job? Why?
10. Besides giving you a raise, what could we do to show you we appreciate you and what you bring to this organization?
11. What would you like to be doing in the next 2 or 3 years? In the next 3 to 5 years?
12. What could I do to help you perform better in your current role, help you prepare for future jobs, and simply do my job better?

To help your employees gather their thoughts, give them a copy of the questions ahead of your meeting. Then when you meet, you'll be able to have a more comfortable conversation; one that will yield valuable information for you. Get to know your employees. You'll your potential to retain them.

Copyright 2008 - Liz Weber, CMC - Weber Business Services, LLC.
WBS is a team of Strategic Planning and Leadership Development Consultants, Trainers, and Speakers. Liz can be reached at liz@wbsllc.com or (717)597-8890.
Additional FREE articles can be found at http://www.wbsllc.com/leadership.shtmlnLiz can be reached at mailto:liz@liz-weber.com

Permission to reprint this article is granted as long as you use the complete attribution above - including live website link and e-mail address - and you send me an email at liz@wbsllc.com to let me know where the article will be published.