Haynes and Boone's Newsroom

Challenges of Growth - Legal and Practical Issues Concerning Employee Retention
05/07/1999
Jonathan C. Wilson

Excerpt

Unemployment remains steadfastly low and, along with it, employee loyalty. According to a 1997 employer survey which focused on employee retention, three out of four employers are either "somewhat concerned" (33%), "concerned" (24%) or "very concerned" (17%) about the number of voluntary resignations in their firms. Employers who are trying to fill job openings have been feeling the full force of the Generation X "birth dearth" for several years. The relief which will be afforded when "Generation Y" becomes of working age is still more than a decade away. In the mean time, the high cost of recruiting, hiring and training a new employee is all too often followed by the even higher cost of employee turnover, with the attendant loss of the employers initial investment at hire, time and effort involved in training, and, in some cases, the loss of proprietary information to an existing competitor or a new start-up operation.

All of these factors militate toward a simple truth - - savvy employers must provide a job and a workplace which makes the best employees want to stay. This necessarily means that employers must identify what employees want out of their jobs and act upon this knowledge. The first step, identification, appears deceptively simple. Do you believe that you already know what your employees really want?

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