Employee Engagement: No ring necessary

Recruiting talented and qualified employees is a challenge even with the current high unemployment rates.  We all want a good fit: it helps us relax and focus on moving the business forward.  When a good associate leaves it creates a whole that demands our time, energy, and money.  Once we find the right person it can still take up to six months to get that person up to full speed.

Resources spent to retain a veteran employee is always less than recruiting and training a new staffer.  There are things we can do to keep the quality people we already working for us.  Wages, however, are not at the top of the list.  Salary and benefits are usually factors in determining if a person applies for and accepts a position.  Once a person is on board other factors figure into longevity.  Employee engagement, a concept now being used, is the degree to which an employee is intellectually and emotionally vested in a companies performance (and, by extension, their own).  To a great degree they are internally motivated to succeed. Folks that are highly engaged tend to stay with an organization longer.  Again, assuming the baseline salary and benefit needs are met.

What can we do to engage our employees?  Not a bottle of wine, fancy dinner, and a diamond ring.  Non-financial rewards seem to be they way to go.  We've heard for years that communication is key and it still is.  A genuine effort to keep employees informed and soliciting their feedback still goes along way.  Including staffers at all levels in decision making is a powerful way to engage them-and maybe get ideas you never thought of (pardon may ending preposition).

Investing in an employee's own professional development and helping each employee fulfill their potential is essential.  You can go back and read Deming (1982) see the value of every emplyee that is satisfied with the work they are doing.

Recognition is important but the awards do not have to be financial.  And, being recognized by peers can be just as significant as recognition from a supervisor.

In most regions we currently have more people looking for jobs than there are openings.  As baby-boomers retire the expectation is that there will be too few people to fill future openings.  Recruiting for a good fit is just part of the equation.  We will need to hang on to those that already are in the door.  It costs more to replace a current customer with a new one.  The same is true for employees.  BTW-even though I'm married a bottle of wine and a good meal is always appreciated AND I won't make you get down on one knee.