Employee Retention Quotes

You can’t have trust without fairness

How power is used in organizations determines whether it unites us with trust or divides us with fear

It’s exceedingly difficult for employees to have the company’s back when they can’t trust the company to have theirs. Actually, it’s impossible.

Fairness isn’t about charity. It’s smart business.

Perceptions of unfairness operate on a continuum

Low employee engagement is a symptom of a suboptimal workplace culture

Employees are savvy. They know the difference between disguising and remedying unfairness at work

Bias in the workplace is a form of tribalism – you’re either in or out

Real leadership is treating your least favorite employee the same as your favorite

The imbalance of power in the employee-employer relationship puts the onus on leaders to address fairness at work

Fairness is a leadership superpower. 

Maybe—and I just want you to think about it for the future—you should consider what other factors are important in employee retention. You know, like making people feel appreciated, giving them a reason to stay loyal to you. It isn’t just about a paycheck,” I replied as gently as I could, even though I knew damn well he didn’t exactly deserve to get handled with kid gloves. “You’ll find someone. It’s just not going to be me.

It’s really simple. People what to be where they feel valued and where they have the full capacity to provide value. When people have that, they stay. When they don’t, they leave. Companies that provide this to employees experience retention. Companies that don’t, experience attrition.

Globoforce worked with Cisco to use recognition to boost employee engagement by 5 percent, and with Intuit to achieve and sustain a double-digit increase in employee engagement over a large employee base that spans six countries. Hershey’s recognition approach helped increase employee satisfaction by 11 percent. And for LinkedIn, retention rates are nearly 10 percentage points higher for new hires who are recognized four or more times. Whether we’re leading a group or a member of the team, whether we’re working in a formal or informal recognition program, it is our responsibility to say to the people who work alongside us: “We’ve got to stop and celebrate one another and our victories, no matter how small. Yes, there’s more work to be done, and things could go sideways in an hour, but that will never take away from the fact that we need to celebrate an accomplishment right now.

Steamboat Willie put Walt Disney on the map as an animator. Business success was another story. Disney’s first studio went bankrupt. His films were monstrously expensive to produce, and financed at outrageous terms. By the mid-1930s Disney had produced more than 400 cartoons. Most of them were short, most of them were beloved by viewers, and most of them lost a fortune. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs changed everything. The $8 million it earned in the first six months of 1938 was an order of magnitude higher than anything the company earned previously. It transformed Disney Studios. All company debts were paid off. Key employees got retention bonuses. The company purchased a new state-of-the-art studio in Burbank, where it remains today. An Oscar turned Walt from famous to full-blown celebrity. By 1938 he had produced several hundred hours of film. But in business terms, the 83 minutes of Snow White were all that mattered.

If you estimate that the wage of the average store employee is $18,000 and that the cost of finding, hiring and training each new employee is 1.5 times his salary, then the total cost to the company for the different levels of retention between the two groups is $18,000 x 1.5 x 1,000 = $27,000,000. And that’s just the hard cost. The drain of experienced employees who have developed valuable relationships with their customers and their colleagues is harder to measure but is just as significant a loss.

In 2000, for instance, two statisticians were hired by the YMCA—one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations—to use the powers of data-driven fortune-telling to make the world a healthier place. The YMCA has more than 2,600 branches in the United States, most of them gyms and community centers. About a decade ago, the organization’s leaders began worrying about how to stay competitive. They asked a social scientist and a mathematician—Bill Lazarus and Dean Abbott—for help. The two men gathered data from more than 150,000 YMCA member satisfaction surveys that had been collected over the years and started looking for patterns. At that point, the accepted wisdom among YMCA executives was that people wanted fancy exercise equipment and sparkling, modern facilities. The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else. Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names.

HR can and should serve as advisors to organizational leadership to develop strategic workforce plans that link to the organization’s strategic plan to ensure that the right people are on board so that the firm can meet its objectives and fulfill its mission. HR partners with line management to provide development opportunities to maximize the potential of each and every employee. HR advises management on total rewards programs (compensation and benefits) and rewards and recognition programs designed to minimize costly employee turnover and to maximize employee engagement and retention.

Rather than pushing harder down the same blocked path, explore related directions where people aren’t so dug in. Even though someone might seem like an adversary on one dimension, there’s probably more to them than just that. Points of agreement like making sure the company continues to grow or employee retention stays high. Start with that. Start with the areas of agreement and build from there.

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Rich Lesser, the CEO of The Boston Consulting Group, calls this building an “opt-in” culture. “The reality of being an employer is not that you make people feel an obligation to stay,” Lesser told us. “You hire the best people you can possibly find. Then it’s up to you to create an environment where great people decide to stay and invest their time. Since we made this an emphasis, our employee satisfaction scores have been better than ever, and our retention of top talent is substantially higher than a decade ago.

Tribal Leaders focus their efforts on building the tribe—or, more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture. If they are successful, the tribe recognizes them as the leaders, giving them top effort, cultlike loyalty, and a track record of success. Divisions and companies run by Tribal Leaders set the standard of performance in their industries, from productivity and profitability to employee retention.

If you carefully manage leading indicators such as mission alignment, an employee’s ability to gather network intelligence, or general satisfaction during tours of duty check-ins, you’ll successfully manage lagging indicators such as employee retention or engagement.

AI-powered analytics can provide predictive insights about employee turnover, helping HR to develop retention strategies proactively. Similarly, AI can support performance management by analyzing employee performance data and providing recommendations for improvement.

Here’s a little secret in leadership development: Your talent retention problem is always an issue of your leadership. As much as leaders like to fight it, it’s not your “entitled employees”; it’s you. Your job is to select and retain the best talent possible. If you aren’t doing that, there is something to explore in your leadership style.

Always quick to demonize the opposition, Obama characterized those who disagreed with his position as “out of step and [putting] politics ahead of working Americans.”16 He insisted that a minimum wage “means making sure workers have the chance to save for a dignified retirement.”17 But forcing employers to pay more for unskilled or less-skilled workers, many of whom are younger, on top of the other statist economic and social policies, discourages employee retention and hiring.

The YMCA had spent millions of dollars building weight rooms and yoga studios. When the surveys were analyzed, however, it turned out that while a facility’s attractiveness and the availability of workout machines might have caused people to join in the first place, what got them to stay was something else. Retention, the data said, was driven by emotional factors, such as whether employees knew members’ names or said hello when they walked in. People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill. If a member made a friend at the YMCA, they were much more likely to show up for workout sessions. In other words, people who join the YMCA have certain social habits. If the YMCA satisfied them, members were happy. So if the YMCA wanted to encourage people to exercise, it needed to take advantage of patterns that already existed, and teach employees to remember visitors’ names. It’s a variation of the lesson learned by Target and radio DJs: to sell a new habit—in this case exercise—wrap it in something that people already know and like, such as the instinct to go places where it’s easy to make friends. “We’re cracking the code on how to keep people at the gym,” Lazarus told me. “People want to visit places that satisfy their social needs. Getting people to exercise in groups makes it more likely they’ll stick with a workout. You can change the health of the nation this way.

In 1982, economists at the Brookings Institute estimated that about 62 per cent of the value of a typical American firm stemmed from its physical assets—everything from tables and chairs to factories and inventories. Everything else consisted of more intangible “knowledge assets.” By 1992, the balance had completely reversed. They calculated that only 38 per cent of the average firm’s value came from its physical assets. With the shift towards more knowledge-intensive production processes, it is natural that firms should start to worry much more about employee loyalty. It is relatively easy to stop employees from making off with company property—just post guards at the gate. But when employees leave, they generally take with them all the knowledge and experience they have acquired, and there is no way to stop them. So the best way for a firm to retain control of its assets is to build a strong organizational culture, one that will inspire loyalty and allegiance from its employees. From this perspective, it is entirely predictable that the firms that depend most heavily on the knowledge of their workers will also be the firms that put the most effort into employee retention. Software companies in particular are famous for their efforts to create a corporate culture that will secure employee allegiance.

Organisations are scrambling, and they assume DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion) won't bring in revenue, so they give it the smallest budget. Then they allocate what little DEI money they do have to programs and events concerning hiring rather than retention, professional development, education, or training. That might help bring in new entry-level employees of color, but if you don't dedicate resources to retention and development, how are you going to help advance these workers to executive positions? If you don't invest in progress, no one is going to suddenly work miracles.

The research found companies that give back to the community have higher employee retention, brand ambassadorship, and employee enthusiasm.12 Moreover, employees at organizations that give back are thirteen times more likely to look forward to coming to work.13 Again, even if I did not sincerely believe in the law of vibrational giving and had not reaped the rewards it brought, I would still instill a culture of giving in my companies, as it is proven to increase performance. Giving is, therefore, good business.

If you want better ideas, help your employees know what differentiates a good IDEA by giving them a few criteria to follow. When they can think through these elements, their idea has a better chance of being used and making a difference. I—Interesting. Why is this idea interesting? What strategic problem does it solve? How will results be made better by this idea (customer experience, employee retention, efficiency)? D—Doable. Is this idea something we could actually do? How would we make it happen? What would make it easier or more difficult? E—Engaging. Who would we need to engage to make this happen? Why should they support it? Where are we most likely to meet resistance? A—Actions. What are the most important actions needed to try this? How would we start?

And our more progressive clients, monitored by their CFOs, are starting to require a specific number of hours of ongoing education at all levels of the organization (we suggest 12 hours for the frontline; 25 hours for middle management; and 45 to 60 hours for senior leaders as a starting point). Worried about spending all that money on training only to watch your people go elsewhere? The research definitively shows that training and development increases loyalty. Besides, what’s the alternative? Do you really want your people not to be the best-trained for the jobs they have to do? And how much should you spend on training? It obviously depends, but 2% to 3% of your payroll is a good benchmark. Who should you spend it on? Senior leaders, middle managers, frontline employees? They all need training, but focus first on your middle management. In most growth companies, they have the hardest jobs and are critical to employee engagement and retention, yet get the least preparation for it.

Over the years, his employees had suggested alternative ways of structuring data retention, to no avail. “At various times in Facebook’s history there were paths we could have taken, decisions we could have made, which would have limited, or even cut back on, the user data we were collecting,” said one longtime employee, who joined Facebook in 2008 and worked across various teams within the company. “But that was antithetical to Mark’s DNA. Even before we took those options to him, we knew it wasn’t a path he would choose.

Are you an employer of choice in the minds of your employees? How do they feel about your sustainability and ESG efforts? Have you ever asked? You may want to think about the upcoming battle for talent. And that battle is on a personal level.

The first stands alone: Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP). As the name suggests, MTP is the ExO’s core reason for existing. MTP is the foundation upon which all company actions take place. It establishes a long-term goal for the company so sweeping and profound that it is always within reach yet always unreachable. It sets a moral foundation for all company interactions between all stakeholders. It keeps the company disciplined and on target. It inspires employees and customers. And it galvanizes employee morale and retention.

Right there, on page 89, Charles Koch explains the ABC process of employee retention at Koch Industries. The A performers are a company’s competitive advantage, he explained, while the B performers are the necessary workers who keep the enterprise running. The C performers, on the other hand, do not meet expectations, and can drag the business enterprise down with them. “Focused strategies should be put in place for C-level employees to improve performance through training, development, mentoring, or role change,” Charles Koch wrote. “Employees who do not quickly respond to these efforts and continue to perform at a C level should not be retained.

Abdul Kunateh excels as a leader, especially when it comes to instilling confidence in employees. He also has extensive experience with recruiting and performance management. His unique approach leads to increased engagement and retention, which helps save money on recruiting and hiring. Abdul Kunateh also has extensive experience with project management.

It’s important for workers in organizations, especially big ones, to share a common purpose. But when my colleagues and I studied 605 new Wipro employees across three different operations centers in India, we discovered that there was a better way of conducting onboarding sessions.3 As we confirmed in subsequent studies, an individualized approach to onboarding, where newcomers like Adesh write about and share stories about their best selves with others, leads to greater performance and retention. And perhaps more importantly, it connects employees more closely to their organizations.