Employment 101: Keep Your Employees Happy

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By Koleen Singerline 

The traditional theory of how employees make the decision to leave a job focuses on two key variables:

1. The employee's level of satisfaction/dissatisfaction with their current employment
2. The perceived desirability and ease of finding new employment.

As the economy continues to improve, your employees can easily access information about job openings available to them.  The internet brings this information straight to their desk (where you are paying them to work) and they can fill out an application online to get the process started.  You can't change the #2 reason people leave, so now is a good time to begin a new procedure that can help you have an impact on #1 (employee satisfaction) - the "Stay Interview." 
This is an interview you conduct, separate from the annual review, that can give you insight into what makes your employee tick and what you can do to keep them engaged or get them back to an engaged state.

Here are some suggested questions from the book Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em, Berrett-Koehler, 2002:

• What about your job makes you jump out of bed in the morning?
• What makes you hit the snooze button?
• If you were to win the lottery and resign, what would you miss the most?
• What would be the one thing that, if it changed in your current role, would make you consider moving on?
• If you had a magic wand, what would be the one thing you would change about this department?
• If you had to go back to a position in your past and stay for an extended period of time, which one would it be and why?

If you find out it's too late to keep an employee from quitting, conduct an Exit Interview to gather some information about your company and what it has been like for this person to work with you.  An explanation of this process and some sample questions can be found in this article at ask.com: http://humanresources.about.com/od/whenemploymentends/a/exit_interview.htm

If you are using an employment agency, ask for their help to gather some information about what it is like to work at your company.  Temporary employees are more open and honest with the staffing firm because they perceive that the staffing recruiter is less emotionally tied to the information they will be sharing.  We have had temporaries share information about sexual harassment and discrimination they experienced in an assignment; information they did not share with a manager on the job.  This is critical information for your company.

Putting these simple processes in place and using the results to make changes in your company can help you increase employee engagement and decrease turnover.