Retaining your staff in tight labor markets is a challenge. It is becoming even a bigger challenge if the demand for professionals is way bigger than the supply of these professionals.

What can you do?

A lot.

Here some practical tips ( and the list is not complete):

1. Increase the salaries of your key people before they ask for an increase
2. Ask your staff what it is they would like to be improved (before they leave you because of some problems)
3. Fix it immediately
4. Create transparency about everything in your company (the goals, the policies, the finances…just everything)
5. Keep your promises (many great people leave because (forgotten) promises are not kept)
6. Reward your top-performers generously
7. Train your not-so-good-performers so they can become top-performers
8. Search & select the very best: don’t compromise so engage an agency (us:-) doing a thorough selection process
9. Pay salaries which are competitive on the labor market
10. Select your staff with a solid assessment center so that you are sure you both match greatly
11. Remove negative trouble makers, evil managers and team-leaders (many companies have departments with relatively high personnel fluctuation and this is usually caused by bad managers and/or evil team-members)
12. Don’t hire overqualified staff for simple jobs, often the profiles are unnecessarily demanding, and when you place overqualified people they will leave
13. Avoid number 13 🙂
14. Show a loyal attitude towards your staff instead of demanding them to be loyal to you
15. Do everything you can so that your staff can be maximally successful, instead of you demanding they will do whatever they can to make you successful

And if you know more tips & tricks…please share them with all of us….we all need to retain our wonderful colleagues….

Cheers

Gerard Koolen

gerard.koolen@lugera.com

+31622959248