It’s tough to hold on to good employees, but it shouldn’t
be. Most of the mistakes that companies make are easily avoided. When you do
make mistakes, your best employees are the first to go, because they have the most
options.
If you can’t keep your best employees engaged, you can’t
keep your best employees. While this should be common sense, it isn’t common
enough. A survey by CEB found that one-third of star employees feel disengaged
from their employer and are already looking for a new job.
When you lose good employees, they don’t disengage all at
once. Instead, their interest in their jobs slowly dissipates. Michael Kibler,
who has spent much of his career studying this phenomenon, refers to it
as brownout. Like dying stars, star employees slowly lose their fire
for their jobs.
“Brownout is different from burnout because workers
afflicted by it are not in obvious crisis,” Kibler said. “They seem to be
performing fine: putting in massive hours, grinding out work while
contributing to teams, and saying all the right things in meetings. However,
they are operating in a silent state of continual overwhelm, and the
predictable consequence is disengagement.”
In order to prevent brownout and to retain top talent,
companies and managers must understand what they’re doing that contributes to
this slow fade. The following practices are the worst offenders, and they must
be abolished if you’re going to hang on to good employees.
They make a lot of stupid rules. Companies
need to have rules—that’s a given—but they don’t have to be shortsighted and
lazy attempts at creating order. Whether it’s an overzealous attendance policy
or taking employees’ frequent flier miles, even a couple of unnecessary rules
can drive people crazy. When good employees feel like big brother is watching,
they’ll find someplace else to work.
They treat everyone equally. While
this tactic works with school children, the workplace ought to function
differently. Treating everyone equally shows your top performers that no matter
how high they perform (and, typically, top performers are work horses), they
will be treated the same as the bozo who does nothing more than punch the
clock.
They tolerate poor performance. It’s
said that in jazz bands, the band is only as good as the worst player; no
matter how great some members may be, everyone hears the worst player. The same
goes for a company. When you permit weak links to exist without consequence,
they drag everyone else down, especially your top performers.
