Andrea Rakytová Valentová
Faculty of Management, Comenius University in Bratislava
SLOVAKIA
ABSTRACT:
Everyone knows that retention of key employees is essential for organizational success. To maintain a stable workforce, employers must deliberately engage in retention activities. These efforts range from re-recruiting interviews to family activities and individualized compensation packages. People need to feel wanted, valued, appreciated. They want to do meaningful work and have their say in how their jobs are designed, managed and measured. Today’s employees want to be stable, but they are often “chased out” by those who are more concerned with power and position than with caring for people.
Clearly a competitive advantage in today’s turbulent employment environment is not achieved easily. Building a stable workforce takes considerably more than just throwing money at people or giving them use of fancy car. There is more involved than just a lot of aggressive recruiting or strong intention to retention. To achieve workforce stability, with all its financial and non financial advantages, employers have to invest energy in resources in a range of discrete strategies.
Key employee retention is critical for the long term health and success of business. Managers readily agree that retaining of your best employees ensures customers´ satisfaction, product sales, satisfied co-workers and reporting staff, effective succession planning and deeply imbedded organizational knowledge and learning. Employee retention is one of the primary measures of the health of your organization. If you are losing critical staff members, you can safely bet that other people in their departments are looking as well.
KEY WORDS: retention, stable workforce, discrete strategies.
