Retention is on everyone’s mind with the job-hopping world we now live in. I have to admit, if we see a candidate who has been locked in with a company for 10+ years, we start to wonder about their overall development. Today Kevin Wheeler offers an excellent article on the ERE website that deals with strategies to implement to improve employee retention.

Money Won’t Hold Them starts with a quick history lesson on how we got here:

But somewhere in the early 1980s, things began to change. The first crack came with the advent of the 401(k) and (b) plans that freed employees from the corporate retirement programs. The 401 programs are, in effect, portable pensions. In effect, you take your accumulated savings and add to them somewhere else.

The pension fund is toast for we Gen Xers and younger. Workers now freed from a loyalty-inducing pension plan now look for opportunities more freely.

I often hear managers, CEOs, and supervisors promising this and that and making speeches about how committed they are to their workers.

When it comes time to allow workers some say in their work, or the opportunity to transfer to another department, or the chance to try something new, they just as often hesitate. Words can take on many meanings and can be twisted to fit any occasion. Deeds speak for themselves.

We’ve seen that approach all too often. I think he is spot on in that commentary.

Finally, he provides 6 suggestions for improving retention that are must reads. I’ll pull a couple of pieces from the article as a tease:

4. Pay at market rates or more. Don’t think that your benefits or loyalty will keep employees happy. Err on the side of generosity when you offer pay increases and never let pay be an excuse for an employee leaving. Pay is never the real reason people leave a firm, but it sure makes a great excuse for employees. Most organizations can’t defend themselves on this issue because they don’t pay that well.

6. Remember that we have entered a time when the employees are in charge. They can cripple your success and they know exactly how. They own the tools of production, and management needs to understand that the best companies, those that are most financially successful, have employees who enjoy “just enough” management and a lot of freedom. Today’s employees are better educated, more independent, less afraid, more secure, and far more entrepreneurial than those of even 10 years ago. This means that HR policies and management styles have to radically change.

As they say, read the entire thing.

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This CareerJournal.com article can only be categorized as good news – More Employers Are Basing Raises, Bonuses on Results.  Of course, none of this is surprising for salespeople since the vast majority are compensated based on their successful selling.  For other positions, this may be a bit of a surprise:

Employers have turned to tying pay to performance to shore up costs and to try to retain their best workers. “There is a limited amount of money that people have, and they are trying to get a better return on those compensation dollars,” says Steve Gross, Mercer’s global-reward practice leader.

I am a passionate proponent of merit-based pay structures and raises.  I was drawn to sales due to the fact that you could increase your pay by simply performing.  What a fantastic idea!  Of course, the financial guys hit the nail on the head in terms of why companies are drawn to this approach:

For one thing, he says, “companies like to move away from fixed costs to variable costs.”

One caveat we often encounter is financial team members who look at a high-performing salesperson’s commission with a skeptical eye.  This approach is reprehensible to me.  The assumption becomes that the revenue would be coming in whether the salesperson was on the account or not.  That belief then leads to the salesperson being viewed as an expense and their commission plan gets tweaked.

Big mistake.  The salesperson will have their resume on the street that evening.

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We continue this week with another mission-critical sales manager trait.  This measurement reveals a manager’s ability to take responsibility without using excuses for a lack of team peformance.

Accountability For Others
The capacity of a sales manager to take responsibility for the consequences of the actions of those under their management. This trait encompasses taking responsibility for the decisions and actions of subordinates and not shifting focus on blame or poor performance back onto them, or somewhere else. This trait derived from an internal responsibility and accountability to one€™s self as a manager. This internal willingness is to accept responsibility associated with being in a position of management. It involves understanding that it is the task of the manager to accurately evaluate and understand the abilities of his/her employees
and to set realistic goals and expectations based on the resources and capabilities available.

A sales manager with strength in this trait will not try to make excuses for a bad decision, which resulted in poor performance by an employee. Instead, they will make every effort to try and identify the cause of both the poor performance and any mistakes they made in assigning the task. Their focus will be more on correcting the problem to ensure future success as opposed to protecting themselves.

As in personal accountability, a weakness in this area can indicate a sales manager who is more concerned with appearance and image than with results and success. They will seek to place blame for a bad decision on any factor which does not lie solely with them. Taking the blame would detract from their abilities in the public image. Although achieving goals and success can be important to this person, their self-image is often fragile and protecting it is much more important.

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